Welcome to the Omaha Perl Mongers Group!

If you are a seasoned Perl programmer, or just starting out, and if you live in our Omaha, Nebraska area, we'd love to have you join our community. Further down this page, you will find contact information and other links of interest.

Perl is a high-level, general-purpose, interpreted, dynamic programming language. Perl was originally developed by Larry Wall in 1987 as a general-purpose Unix scripting language to make report processing easier. Since then, it has undergone many changes and revisions and has become widely popular amongst programmers. Larry Wall continues to oversee development of the core language, and its upcoming version, Perl 6.

Perl borrows features from other programming languages including C, shell scripting (sh), AWK, and sed. The language provides powerful text-processing facilities without the arbitrary data length limits of many contemporary Unix tools, facilitating easy manipulation of text files. It is also used for graphics programming, system administration, network programming, applications that require database access and CGI programming on the Web. Perl is nicknamed "the Swiss Army chainsaw of programming languages" due to its flexibility and adaptability.

As of 2010, Perl is used for a wide range of tasks including system administration, web development, network programming, games, bioinformatics, and GUI development, just to name a few popular tasks.

The language is intended to be practical (easy to use, efficient, complete) rather than beautiful (tiny, elegant, minimal). Its major features include support for multiple programming paradigms (procedural, object-oriented, and functional styles), reference counting memory management (without a cycle-detecting garbage collector), built-in support for text processing, and a large collection of third-party modules.

According to Larry Wall, Perl has two slogans. The first is "There's more than one way to do it", commonly known as TMTOWTDI. The second slogan is "Easy things should be easy and hard things should be possible".

For a more detailed look at Perl, please see the Wikipedia entry on Perl, as well as the many links, futher down on this page.

What is a Perl Monger?

One definition of 'Perl Monger' is that we're "a loose confederation of Perl hackers, coders, and accidental programmers whose goal is to develop the social community of Perl - after all, it's more than a language - it's a culture and a floor wax." Whatever.

We, in the Omaha Perl Mongers Group, use Perl as a programming language, and like it, and think it makes our work/play/lives a little easier. Some of us are application programmers, sysadmins, or technically-inclined webmasters; and some of us use Perl recreationally. Some are fairly expert; some are just beginning and want to learn the language.

How Can I Get Involved With the Omaha Perl Mongers?

Join our mailing list and come to our meetings! We welcome new members of all skill levels. New to computer programming and motivated to learn? You're in luck! Perl is free, and so are our meetings, mailing list, etc.

Join #perl in Slack! Around the world IRC remains very popular: #perl-help

Join our Perl LinkedIn Community here: Perl6 Advocacy Perl Programming LinkedIn Group. And, on Facebook: Perl Computer Language Programming group.

Meetings

We've joined forces with OMG!Code, the Omaha Maker Group: Source Code guild. Check out that website for our upcoming meetings!

If you have other questions about Perl or Perl Mongers, discover more here: Perl.org and, Perl Mongers.

Some really cool Perl stuff:

For your intellectual edification, here are general interest links related to Perl:

Perl News

Perl Object Orientation

Perl Presentations and Short Articles

Perl People

Perl Humor

Perl Wikis

Everything Else

If you find that a link is broken, would you be so kind as to let me know? You may drop me a quick note, using my online comment form.

 
 

Some Larry Wall videos:

About Perl 6 (Nov 2015?)