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Comment by piaste | Hacker News Reader

And Perl's first release was in... 1987.

Yes, late December, 1987, after the events I describe. It was released on Usenet, as I recall. I didn't even know what Usenet was back then. For me, it was pretty exciting to dial up a BBS, crash their software, and read through the code that the BBS was written in (and later contact the sysop to tell them how to replicate it).

I doubt I could have even compiled the software onto a COCO 2 computer.

Sure, it's just funny that your example of "thirty years later" is code that someone could in principle have written in the same year (well, almost - I imagine Perl 1 might require some changes from the Perl 5 version).

If I had to show how far we've got since then, and how different the experience could be for a novice programmer, I think I would display a .GIF where I press F12 in the browser, and write two lines of Javascript in the console, something like:

    var words = await fetch("some online JSON dictionary").json();
    var lexed = "insert sentence".split(/punctuation regex/).map(w => words.indexOf(w));

I don't write JS habitually and I'm on my phone so it's probably got some mistakes, but you get the idea!

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