On 10/7/06, @ Rocteur CC <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:

I was just reading The State of the Onion 10 http://www.perl.com/pub/
a/2006/09/21/onion.html by Larry, and if you have not read it I think
you will enjoy it. I really ROFL when I saw that Randal was our own
Evil Brother Damian ;-)

No; Damian is Damian and Randal is Randal. Damian is the one from the
other end of the planet; oddly, his insanity is also roughly 160
degrees out-of-phase with Randal's.

Anyway, Larry refers to Perl as SHE.. Does anyone know when Perl
became a SHE and why ?

Probably from the beginning. Larry is a linguist, and he's aware that
nouns can have gender. He took a lot of care picking the name Perl.
Some alternative names Larry considered were Pearl and Gloria, both
unmistakeably feminine. The latter would be to name the language after
his wife; but he realized that people might one day misunderstand if
he were overheard saying "I just can't get Gloria to do what I want
these days."

For another data point, he's also said that he doesn't know how he
overlooked the name Ruby (feminine, and also has a gemstone
connotation) when he scoured lists of four- and five-letter words in
search of a suitable name for Perl.

Of course, by (mis-)spelling it as he did, he made it much easier to
find once web searches were invented; so it seems to have been a good
choice.

Cheers!

--Tom Phoenix
Stonehenge Perl Training

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