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And here I thought it would be Chartreuse.

I've already been using chartreuse in most of my work, ever since I saw St. Wall using it in the `90s for his "home page." He's still doing it, and so am I. http://wall.org/~larry/

Client: Why is the site so ugly?
Me: So that you'll hire a web designer to fix the CSS when I'm done with the backend :)

Also regarding Tolkien, he was a linguist and invented many languages in his stories. The books inspired Larry Wall to become a linguist and work at a job processing electronic communications, and that's how Perl was born.

He talks about the Natural Languages Principles in Perl here: http://wall.org/~larry/natural.html

Larry is a trained linguist and he applied natural language principles to the design of Perl.

The interaction between the structure of natural language and the structure of the human brain/mind is a big topic in the realm of linguistics. Try googling for terms like Language Acquisition Device or Neurocognitive Linguistics.

Clearly you're not using Perl the way it was meant to be used.

I think Larry might disagree with your assertion that Perl was meant to be used in a specific fashion.

You don't have to go back in time to kill the creator of Perl... *wink*

I said start with BASIC, not dwell on it. If a potential programmer becomes so ingrained with the shortcoming of *any* language, it's a fault in the programmer not the language. The quote is from 1975, wherein he also suggested that Projects promoting programming in "natural language" are intrinsically doomed to fail. . I think Larry Wall would disagree, and whether you like Perl or not... you're soaking in it here on Slashdot.

Come on, who cares? Let people be ignorant. It's not like bringing people of below average intelligence or fundamentalist mindset into the scientific fold is going to make them valuable contributors. It'll just be a new type of ignorance to deal with. Let them be.

Hmm. Larry Wall is an evangelical Christian. According to his page, he attends this church.

Now, since his contributions are not valuable by your estimation, what is the name of the programming language which you have been developing for over 20 years and is the de facto language for development of dynamic web content and for automating system administration tasks on nearly every operating system?

I'm waiting.

The article linked in the New York Times correctly uses fewer and not less. Corruption must have occured.

I completely forgot what I was going to post. So I'll say something else. About how Perl programmers would disagree with you.

Larry Wall's Perl is a fantastic language, because as a linguist he tried to emulate the versility of natural languages. Perl includes pronouns (it, them) and the same characters can be used for different functions, depending on context. He wanted to travel to a remote people without writing and help them create a system, but couldn't afford to, so blessed us by creating Perl. Thank you. See http://www.wall.org/~larry/natural.html

I've forgotten again. Shit. Sorry. Matt

Oh yeah. Making a program language more natural isn't about using more English words and fewer punctuation characters - *cough* to the languages that want you to write number.arithmetic.multiply - a ridiculous construction, but by helping the user achieve a similar command (if not comfort) we have with out natural languages. Greater writers are never confined by their language, they play with it, tease it, and often ignore all convention to create their masterpieces. What programming languages can boast poetry?
http://www.perlmonks.org/index.pl?node=Perl%20Poet ry

Maybe you are setting the standards too high? Of course religion is stupid, but there is a sort of "shhh! don't say it out loud" understanding that usually prevents people from posting rants like yours. Also, do you have any ideea how hard it is to live without a point of support? Well, you probably do, but let me remind you anyways: hard. So most people don't bother, since they'll be happier anyways believing in something.

And lastly, Larry Wall. An exception, true, but reason enough to avoid blanket statements like "all religious people are idiots".

Don't get me wrong btw :) I _really_ enjoyed your post. Found it refreshing. Feel free to post the links you were threatening with earlier...

He seems to think that his way is the only way.

Imagine a programming language that is really just a mix of every other programming language available and you would have a close approximation of English.

Perl?

use Natural::Language::Principles::In::Perl;

Learn it once, use it many times. You learn a natural language once and use it many times. The lesson for a language designer is that a language should be optimized for expressive power rather than for ease of learning. It's easy to learn to drive a golf cart, but it's hard to express yourself in one.

Learn as you go. You don't learn a natural language even once, in the sense that you never stop learning it. Nobody has ever learned any natural language completely.

Tinkering With Perl: A Child's Guide is a clear and concise introduction to Perl for all ages.

Larry Wall (b. September 27, 1954), programmer, linguist, author, is most widely known for his creation of the Perl programming language in 1987. Wall earned his bachelor's degree from Seattle Pacific University in 1976.

Wall is the author of the rn Usenet software and the nearly universally used patch. He has won the International Obfuscated C Code Contest twice and was the recipient of the first Free Software Foundation's award for the Advancement of Free Software in 1998.

Beyond his technical skills, Wall is known for his wit and often ironic sense of humor, which he displays in the comments to his source code or on Usenet. For example: "We all agree on the necessity of compromise. We just can't agree on when it's necessary to compromise."

Larry Wall is a trained linguist, and has used this training in the design of Perl. He is the co-author of Programming Perl (often referred to as the Camel Book), which is the definitive resource for Perl programmers. He has edited the Perl Cookbook. His books were published by O'Reilly.

Wall's Christian faith has informed some of the terminology of Perl, such as the name itself, a biblical reference to the "Pearl of great price" (Matthew 13:46). Similar references are the function names bless and confess and the organization of his talks into categories such as apocalypse and exegesis. Wall has also alluded to his faith when he has spoken at conferences, including a rather straightforward statement of his beliefs at the August, 1997 Perl Conference and a discussion of Pilgrim's Progress at the YAPC (Yet Another Perl Conference) in June, 2000.

Wall continues to oversee further development of Perl and serves as the Benevolent Dictator for Life of the Perl project. His role in Perl is best conveyed by the so-called 2 Rules, taken from the official Perl documentation:

              1. Larry is always by definition right about how Perl should behave. This means he has final veto power on the core functionality.
              2. Larry is allowed to change his mind about any matter at a later date,regardless of whether he previously invoked Rule 1.

        Got that? Larry is always right, even when he was wrong.

Larry's personal home page
Larry Wall wiki quotes

"And if you trace it all back to its roots, we need God, the ultimate in control, and we need evolution, the ultimate in chaos. Some of you may disagree with one or the other of those assertions, but I don't think it's entirely an accident that Charles Darwin is entombed in a church."

- Larry Wall

http://www.wall.org/~larry/keynote/keynote.html

Larry might be a bit offended at that, seeing as how he's a Christian himself ;)

The problem isn't language designers its us developers, we don't want to spend a week learning a new syntax for a loop, we want to use what we used before. In other words we are luddites.

I strongly disagree. Not all of us are a bunch lazy idiots as you imply. If I didn't want to spend a week learning a new syntax for a loop I wouldn't have finished reading a second Perl 6 book yesterday, now would I? I have already spent man-months learning the language that is not even fully designed yet, so I would appreciate if you kindly exclude me--and most of Slashdotters--from your hasty generalization, for even though I would tend to agree with you that most of people in general are incompetent idiots, I believe that Slashdot community is a rare exception to this sad rule, or otherwise we wouldn't be so enthusiastically discussing the possibility of designing a Heraclitean programming language with its roots in the philosophy of ancient Greece--which nota bene would be an interesting addition to postmodern languages we already have. But even though I disagree with your premiss, I fully agree with your conclusion that Java and C# are rubbish, that of course is undeniable. But this conclusion by itself is quite useless unless we answer the question why they are the way they are. Why does the competence of your proverbial marketing department is nearly without exception reversely proportional to the technical advantages of the technology in question? When we answer this question, a lot of other answers will become clear.

And Perl is a camel designed by this guy.

Seems they're looking to reinvent COBOL, and we all know what a great success that was. Anyone remember The Last One ??

They'd do better actually talking to lingusts and looking to apply the principles of natural languages to programming, rather than the syntax.

Of course, some people have discussed this already, but you say things like Local ambiguity is okay or Topicalization or Pronominalization to a lot of developers and they can't see past their prejudice of "I know one language and I'm too scared to look at another".

If you dare let go of your prejudices and re-consider some of the fundamentals you might just be surprised.

Seems they're looking to reinvent COBOL, and we all know what a great success that was. Anyone remember The Last One ??

They'd do better actually talking to lingusts and looking to apply the principles of natural languages to programming, rather than the syntax.

Of course, some people have discussed this already, but you say things like Local ambiguity is okay or Topicalization or Pronominalization to a lot of developers and they can't see past their prejudice of "I know one language and I'm too scared to look at another".

If you dare let go of your prejudices and re-consider some of the fundamentals you might just be surprised.

What horny Slashdotters are keen on is your daughter.

Hmmm ... "- intentional blankness -" -- were we expected?

Yes, but Perl is worse than the others, simply because the language spec itself has so many rules and edge cases that nobody can ever remember them all.

You don't have to remember them all. You just need to be able to remember how to write a reasonable subset that will get you where you need to go. And, you need to be able to remember enough to read others' code, and maybe not even with 100% fidelity as long as you get the gist of it. Perl is indeed a complex language, but it has one quality going for it that redeems that: where it gets complex, good sense and smart linguistics have been applied. Larry Wall, the creator of Perl, knows a fair bit about linguistics, which is to say he knows a fair bit about how the human brain actually processes language. Note that this is a fundamentally different thing than how recursive-descent parsers process language. So he makes good decisions, and often -- if you get yourself integrated into the Perl culture a bit -- you can go with your intuition and be right most of the time when you see something you haven't seen before (or have forgotten).

Here's a test I use to determine whether a language syntax is too complex: Can an 85th-percentile coder write a parser for it from memory?

That's a strange test. I don't think Java would even pass that test. I once took a compilers class and built a toy-Java compiler, so I know how to write a parser. And when I felt it would be good for my career to put a Java certification on my resume, I decided to study for it by reading the entire Java Language Specification word for word. Bottom line is, you may THINK as a regular user of it you know the language backwards and forwards, but you don't.

Another example, this time with ANSI C: Did you know you can legally put a typedef lexically inside a function? Turns out, syntactically, any type of declarator (function, type, variable declaration) can go anywhere any other type of declarator can go. The only restriction is semantic, and although you didn't say anything about an 85th percentile coder writing a semantic analyzer for a language, still the semantics might make you believe that a typedef can't occur inside a function, although if you did, you'd be wrong.

About the only language where I'd say that an 85th percentile user can write a parser for the language is Lisp. And that's because the average Lisp user is smarter and Lisp is simpler than the average syntax.

TIMTOWTDI is a liability more than an asset: It means that no two skilled Perl coders will ever write the same solution

"It's a liability that TIMTOWTDI in Perl, because any two skilled Perl programmers will always write different solutions." Hmm, notice that I just totally restructured your sentence, but it says the same thing? Yet, both of them are clear and easy to read. English is also a TIMTOWTDI language, yet nobody disputes that it's a good thing when it comes to English, because when we use English, we want to be expressive, not uniform. If you are a good writer, having options gives you the flexibility to choose what works for your given situation.

Here's a snippet stolen from something Larry Wall had to say on the subject:

But seriously, many computer scientists have fallen into the trap of trying to define languages like George Orwell's Newspeak, in which it is impossible to think bad thoughts. What they end up doing is killing the creativity of programming.

A more insidious trap, promulgated in many places these days (including the most recent Discover magazine), is that a computer program should be beautiful. Let me tell you that when it comes to computer languages, this is totally bogus. If you want to do beautiful art, you don't go out and buy a beautiful canvas, and a beautiful brush, and a beautiful p

You can learn a lot about programming languages history and family tree from this slides from a conference by Larry Wall.

for best effect use 'PERL' instead of 'Perl' or 'perl', makes you sound even more like you are talking out of your ass

Yeah!!!

I mean with Perl.com typing it as Perl all over the site, not to mention Larry Wall's Very Own Perl Page typing it as Perl, you'll look l33t spelling it as PERL!

For the record, I didn't read it as a troll, but as humour...

What's to document? Darl McBride wrote UNIX (The UNIplexed Information and Computing Service) while working for SCO (The Santa Cruz Operation Group, based in Tarantella, Utah) which was then stolen with the help of IBM by Linus Benedict Torvalds (who called it GNU/Freax and then renamed to GNU/Linux because William R. Della Croce, Jr had trademark on Freax) in his plot to undermine MINIX and the entire concept of microkernel design to slow down the HURD development, or otherwise Bitkeeper would never be able to take over RCS, CVS and Subversion. Even Andrew S. Tanenbaum says it would be impossible for Torvalds to write the entire operating system in 1991. Furthermore, the UNIX family tree and the bastardization thereof is clearly explained on the slides by Larry Wall. So, what's to document? I thought it is all clear now, is it not?

Larry Wall made Perl
See the State of the Onion
Go to Wall.org

Well, maybe I just wanted to whore my favourite paper.

xxx

that Stephenson has submitted a bug to Debian. (Read his In the Beginning Was the Command Line, it's excellent.) A skilled novelist who also participates in the open source process?

That gets him the same free pass that /. gives out to Linus Torvalds and Larry Wall. :-)

have a lower IQ than the fuzz in Larry Wall's navel.

Just testing if you could see that OK :) But seriously -- how goes the corneal transplant T+4.7 years? There hasn't been an update on your transplant in quite some time!

Hi Larry,

I hope you're doing well. How is your
eye?

You should check
Natural Language Principles in Perl by Larry Wall. Also
Human Factors in Programming Languages by
Damian Conway is a good reading.

--
stef

I think you'll find your answer here... http://www.wall.org/~heidi/

Web and CGI programming

I haven't done much of this. (Consider how lousy this web page is.) Consult the appropriate webpage.

On this page, you talk about the natural language principles in Perl. How prominently have these these principles figured into the redesign of Perl? Were any of them "traded-off" against something else? If so what? Do you have any general comments about the linguistic aspects of Perl 6?

People

Richard Stallman -
Eric S. Raymond -
Larry Wall

Linux Programming

Unix

Programming Methodologies

C Programming

C++ Programming

Perl Programming

Network Programming

Open Source

Like Larry Wall ferinstance?

Also coming soon from BitterIrony press:
GNU's guide to user-frendly UI.
The U.S. D.O.J.'s guide to speedy legal precedings.
And:
Larry Wall's guide to maintainable code.

Look here, and remember: search engines kick ass.
--

As a Christian, I have to say it's nice that people like Larry are out there to show we're not all stupid bumbling loonies (it's just Sturgeon's Law cropping up again, you know). If you've read any of his writings, especially his "State of the Onion" addresses, you'll see that he manages to present his thoughts and beliefs in a humorous and intelligent way.

Secondly, I really like the way he manages to make analogies between things. The first year he used sounds, the second year he used pictures, and the third year he used smells. And somehow he ends up with a grand scheme that addresses theology, science, computers, and, of course, Perl.

I think this is great, not just because the subject matter is interesting, but because to be any good at programming, you have to be able to map between different systems. The good ones don't seem to be as focused on depth (although they certainly can be; no one can argue that Knuth isn't good, and he's way hardcore) but on breadth of experience. The more different systems you experience, the more you can abstract the particular thing you have to be working on and actually transcend the implementation language and platform. (Or at least that's what I tell myself, being permanently scatterbrained and distractable :)

Anyway, I don't know how to keep this from sounding hopelessly fanboyish, but ummm Larry Wall is cool and learning new stuff is cool, and I recommend that everybody go read his stuff and then go play with something you've never tried before. Exploration is the One True Way to have fun with computers again.

--

appears to be in Larry wall's family

Rate me on Picture-rate.com

The quote at the end, "I have a book on my bookshelf that I've never read, but that has a great title..." is from Larry Wall's keynote address to the Perl Conference in 1997. The full text of the address may be found here.

Amoung other things he described how it emitted submarine-like acoustic "pings" for proximity sensors on his lawn and very detailed Caller ID identification of incoming phone calls. It had different sounds or music for common people (e.g., Tom Christiansen, or Randal Schwartz), the city or state of unrecognised calls where spoken.

See http://www.wall.org/~larry/natural.html .

... http://www.wall.org/~larry/natural.html

There's a reason for that. Larry Wall is in fact Weird Al. Same shirts, same glasses, same silly grin! I bet you've never seen both of them together. Al is Larry with a wig.

Actually, Larry's homepage isn't unknown. It's here.

Only without the years of development, the thousands of freely available modules, the extreme flexibility, the massive cross-platform portability (you can configure perl for your toaster), integration with Apache, Database support, tens of thousands of existing experts and freely available sample scripts, a huge set of some of the world's best programming language documentation, and (let's not forget) its own poetry (what other language can claim that?), having the core built by one of the coolest people on earth (read and laugh!).

Maybe Pike is amusing, but next to a language like Perl, is it really needed? And can you really claim that Pike has "character" when you can't even write poetry? (Yes, I am a Perl bigot.)

BTW, Hello world in perl? perl -e 'print "hello, world\n";' on the command line will do the trick. Ha!

David E. Weekly

Larry Wall. He doesn't rant against anyone, tries to help everyone, and gives his code away for use by anyone, even Microsoft users. He doesn't restrict his good works to things that only benefit his friends. He doesn't preach, but lives by example.

• Most Improved Kernel Module: FreeBSD's Linux emulation module.

• Unsung Hero: In descending order:
  • Kirk McKusick, for his more than two decades of tireless service and personal sacrifices for our community.
  • Gurusamy Sarathy, Perl project release manager, responsible for bringing fork(2) to Microsoft ports of Perl and a million other things to make Perl code truly robust and portable between Microsoft and Unix platforms, a true Godsend for those of us forced to co-exist on both.
  • Malcolm Beattie, for trailblazing the Perl-to-C compiler, the Perl external byte-code interpreter, the first Perl/Tk implementation,threading in Perl, and safe blackbox compartments for mobile agents in Perl.

• Best Newbie Helper: Mike Stok from comp.lang.perl.misc. He is patient and kind, never chiding nor arrogant. He has been doing this job for many years.

• Most Deserving Open Source Charity: The Usenix Association. They don't take sides. They promote technology and open standards while remaining vendor neutral. They promote all aspects of advanced technology, but are especially supportive of open source solutions. No organization has done more to legitimize us over the last twenty-five years.

• Best Open Source Advocate: Larry Wall. He doesn't rant against anyone, tries to help everyone, and gives his code away for use by anyone, even Microsoft users. He doesn't restrict his good works to things that only benefit his friends. He doesn't preach, but lives by example.

• Best Unix Desktop Eyecandy: The newest version of the randomizing X screensaver. It's really great in a room full of people on acid.

• Best Unix Desktop Earcandy: The following entry in one's .Xdefaults file:

  *visualBell: on

• Best Desktop Theme: ShinyMetal

• Best Open Source-Related Book: In order of highest to lowest, all worthy of the award:
  • Writing Apache Modules with Perl and C by Lincoln Stein and Doug MacEachern.
  • Damian Conway's Object-Oriented Perl.
  • Elements of Programming With Perl by Andrew L. Johnson.

• Best Perl Module: Damian Conway's Class::Multimethods module for traditional OO in Perl.

• Best Apache Module: mod_perl; how can there be any question?

• Best Open Source Text Editor: The vim editor (vi improved), complete with its gvim graphical incarnation and its perl and python plug-ins.

• Best Deserving of a $2,000 Award:
  1. The late, great Rich Stevens's children's college fund
  2. Larry Wall's children's college fund
  3. Dennis Ritchie's retirement fund.
  (Perhaps those count as charities :-)

• Best Designed Interface in a Graphical Application:
  1. The eesh shell for controlling Enlightenment.
  2. The ddd debugger
  3. MacOS X's environment.

• Best Designed Interface in a Non-Graphical Application:
  1. The {Free,Open}BSD ports collection: being able to just cd and type make and have everything happen is the best thing that ever happened to third-parts apps.
  2. The make menuconfig directive for building Linux kernels.
  3. The v4.0 trn newsreader, with scoring and plug-ins.

• Best Dressed: Larry Wall, whether he's wearing Hawaiian shirts, tie-dies, or best of all, his outlandish, pastel-coloured tuxedos.

• Favorite Slashdot Comment Poster:
  1. Guy Harris
  2. Tom Christiansen
  3. Enoch Root
  4. Jay Maynard

• Favorite Slashdot Author: David Brin wins this one hands down.

• Best Slashdot Story of 1999: Eric Raymond's story about viruses on Microsoft vs Unix.

• Big Dumb Patent Bully: Amazon, followed by Unisys.

• Big Dumb Domain Bully: NSI, followed by Etoys.

• Clue Stick Award for FUD in Journalism: Slashdot.

I think we're reaching an interesting point here. Language of course was invented to communicate, and computer languages are called languages for a good reason - they are how we communicate in a deep way both with our computers and with other programmers who help maintain and develop our code. Before C (which came along with UNIX and made things like Lions' book possible) there were machine or assembly languages, which were too close to the machine to be very useable by humans. Or there were abominations like Fortran and Cobol, which generally insulted the intelligence of both the machines and the humans. C and later derivatives like Perl and Java somehow elegantly capture the essence of both machine and human ways of "thinking", and allow deep communication of meaning in relatively concise fashion. Just like a real language.

And this goes to the crux of the definition of open source itself. Binary executables are pure machine language, essentially unusable by humans, but since they contain the full "content" of a program (at least for a particular piece of hardware/configuration etc) why can't we just write good decompilers to convert machine code to source code? Maybe if our artificial intelligence efforts succeed eventually that will be possible, but until then the results of such machine translations are many times worse than the snarls babelfish and its ilk get into translating human languages... Things like variable names, the choice of loop or switch constructs, object-oriented constructs, even regular expression syntax are generally carefully chosen by the programmer for human readability and verifiability of the correctness of the instructions that the machine will carry out. What we're doing is really a new, and very interesting, form of literature... food for thought I hope!

This is not quite the same procedure, but you might be interested in the diary kept by Larry Wall Author of Perl Busy Man last year about his cornea transplant.

In some of the later entries, Larry writes that he might consider LASIK in the future, but evidently that hasn't happened so far.