Perl celebrates its 20th birthday! Perl.com put together some memories.

Proving Them Wrong Around 1991 I wrote a very useful program, in C, which took a bunch of files and then sorted them into groups according to which files had identical contents. A lot of sysadmins at the time wrote to thank me for it. But when I boasted about it at Usenix that year, people told me “oh, you should have written then in Perl.” That was pretty annoying, so I got the Camel Book (pink in those days) so that I could learn Perl and prove that they were wrong. But it turned out that they were right. Mark Dominus is the author of Higher-Order Perl