Perl's 21st anniversary of release is next Thursday, 18 December. Perl 5 is already 14 years old. Though the language has seen many changes since 1994, it can't stand still. Perl 5.10 added many wonderful features and Perl 6 will change the landscape for programming languages, but what's the vision for Perl 5? How can the language stay relevant?

According to the blurb on the book's back cover, "This book offers a highly accessible introduction to natural language processing, the field that supports a variety of language technologies, from predictive text and email filtering to automatic summarization and translation".

"So, the last few weeks I’ve been learning the Haskell programming language, and thought I’d share my thoughts on it. Haskell is a pure functional programming language that supports lazy evaluation (I’ll explain all that in a moment), which has been gaining popularity in some circles (and particularly among academia and computer lingusts).

Perl is a high-level, general-purpose, interpreted, dynamic programming language. Perl was originally developed in 1987 as a general-purpose Unix scripting language to make report processing easier.

Lately, the Perl language has had less buzz surrounding it than many other languages and development environments, but Perl is still a key component on the Internet.

"The Pragmatic Programmers recommend learning a new programming language every year. I thought for a long time that this was a good idea, but didn't really act on it. Instead I'd dabble in a dozen languages a year. While this has built my intuition as to what various languages are like it has not made me a competent programmer in a new language.

Once one of the pillars of the Internet, is Perl now fading away -- or will Perl 6 will spark a renaissance for the programming language?

"...Perl 6 is a rewrite of the Perl language. It will feel Perly, and yet become more modern as it pulls in influences from languages like Ruby and Haskell.

Technically, Perl 6 is just a language specification, and there are at least two implementations underway..."

I begin this tutorial a few weeks ago with Part I and received some very nice comments correcting my (fortunately) minor errors. This isn't a tutorial about how to program in a specific language or even really about how to program.