spider.pl is a program for fetching documnts from a web server, and outputs the documents to STDOUT in a special format designed to be read by Swish-e. The spider can index non-text documents such as ...

Perl is a messy, maddening programming language, the “duct tape of the internet.” But at least you can tell it was made by humans.

My colleagues use my Perl programs and some of them have cygwin installed on their PCs. cygwin has a dir.exe and my Perl programs attempt to use this when I call dir from within my program.

To quote the paper: “Perl users were unable to write programs more accurately than those using a language designed by chance.” Subscribe to the Design newsletter.