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Perl And Standards: Larry Rosler Interview
Kaufmann writes: "In this interview with Joe Johnston (on O'Reilly's Perl.com), Larry Rosler (of HP, one of the people who helped put the 'ANSI' in 'ANSI C') shares his thoughts and advice on the value of standards, optimising Perl code, how Sun should handle Java, and programming in general. Will we ever see a Perl Language Subcommittee too?"
The OO paradigm promised to save the world of software engineering from bugs, complexity, and maintenance difficulties, but if the last 5 or 6 years are to be considered as indicators for future performance, it's not worth the hype.
Think of it in terms of economics. People will write the most complex and featureful software they can that stays within the level of buggyness they can tolerate. Therefore, buggyness will tend to stay constant.
Software is just as buggy now as it was 5 or 6 years ago, but is far more complex. I have personal experience with what can be done with OO to facilitate large complex systems which would be unthinkable without it.
Therefore, people have taken advantage of the ability of OO to manage complexity and pushed the envelope with it. I don't consider this a bad thing.
In addition, while I know Perl well and like it a lot, I would not dare use it for a large complex project.
pornking
According to this a group of hardy hackers are hard at work on a complete, from scratch, re-implementation of perl in C++. This reimplementation is supposed to be completely compatible with perl5. How can you guarantee compatibility without a specification? My guess is, in the same way that perl5 broke some obscure perl4 scripts, perl6 will break perl5 scripts - but without a spec, it's impossible to tell which of those breakages are bugs and which are features!
This is incorrect. As reported on use Perl :-) you can use standard perl 5.6.0 if ActivePerl is unavailable for your platform. I guess that means that if you use Linux for x86, you need to use ActivePerl; but who is gonna know if you don't, and just use perl 5.6.0? They are the same thing.
Well, I'm glad the interview was thought provoking, even if people don't agree with Larry.
He seems like a smart cookie with Perl's best interests at heart.
Hey, they have standards committees for a reason, I guess.
I have to think P5P will not like this thread of conversation. :-)
This is a completely stupid overgeneralization. VB is great at rapid prototyping of visual apps, and Perl sucks big at it.
Right here.
It really is a nice construct though. I am a big fan of anonymous functions. For instance you need to emit errors from a module that will be used various places for various things. Have a package variable with an error sub, by default "croak" but overrideable. That is fine for development and interactive scripts. Now if someone wants to use that in a cron, they can replace your croaks with a routine to page someone before dying...
Cheers,
Ben
My usual seat in the cluetrain is at A HREF="http://pub4.ezboard.com/biwethey.ht
LR: Why not? Perl is superior to Visual Basic in every way imaginable.
Maybe a push from Microsoft will help overcome the barrier of acceptability that I focused on above.
ActiveState's support of Perl has been increasingly bothering me other the last 12 months... am I just being paranoid?
ActiveState's work in bringing Perl to Win32, and supporting OLE effectively, has been a very important piece of work (and done very well to). But having achieved that, they now seem to moving towards the embrace, extend, extinguish paradigm that some might have noticed from a certain other company.
For instance:
- Packages are distributed in PPM format, which as far as I can see are quite separated from the CPAN model which has been so effective for the Perl community
- The Perl Power Contest (sponsored by ActiveState) requires the use of ActivePerl, rather than encouraging generic Perl solutions
- With Gurusamy Sarathy (of ActiveState) looking after the Perl 5.6 release (and doing a great job, I might add), the 'official' binaries for both Win32 and Linux are now ActivePerl packages
- They are partnering with M$oft in many projects. This just makes me uneasy, given M$'s history.
I don't mean to put down the many good things ActiveState has done... But I do feel that the Perl community should be a little cautious about being pulled along by them. Other than the flexibility and power of the language, the things I most like about Perl are:- Scripts I write will run on almost any platform I come across, as long as I avoid direct system calls and avoid assumptions about file system structure
- I know that if a problem has been tackled in Perl, it's solution will be available on CPAN. And furthermore, I know that I can use the CPAN module to install it with just one command.
It seems to me that it would be all too easy to lose these benefits if the MS/ActiveState version of Perl forks much more from 'normal' Perl, and if ActiveState develops its own community around PPM rather than using CPAN.Don't use one hammer but educate yourself to be able to use the appropriate tools for the job at hand.
I agree entirely. Each language and, indeed, programming methodology, was created with a particular problem space in mind. Using each for what it does best is not a bad idea. I've programmed in BASIC (remember when it was an acronym, and needed to be capitalized?), assembler, C, Java, and a host of smaller, niche languages. Each did its job well enough.
In my previous post, I wasn't saying that I've never used OO. I was simply saying that I never encountered the problem space for which OO is the most correct solution. I'd begun to doubt the existence of that problem space, and this interview helped me to realize that I wasn't the only one. I'd thought I wasn't seeing this huge elephant that the rest of the world sees standing right in front of me. But, apparently, either I'm not the only blind one, or the elephant isn't as large as it's been made out to be.
-Joe
I could see if there was GPerl, and SunPerl and IBMPerl, and HPPerl.. but there really is only one person so isn't that the standard?
Hmm.. oh well. If it makes people stop using system calls in perl scrips I'll be happy.. I especially like the 'script' ne 'program' part. Jon++
And why the hell are the first 5-10 posts always flamebait/trolls/offtopic?
nerdfarm.org
Dacels Jewelers can't be trusted.
Rosler is not an object oriented trailblazer, nor is he out to prevent good innovation. Instead, he supports good languages that help do useful things.
I've worked on massive multi-platform efforts at Oracle, and have to say that C is a great language for this. It is extremely compatible across platforms.
Perl, although supporting some object behaviour, is capable of anything Rosler has needed from it. He (and many others) don't need heirarchy to write a simple web app, nor to format / translate data.
Already, Perl has helped solve many simple development issues where I have worked. Although there is a cutting edge of enhanced Perl, the current 5.xxx library is quite mature. For tasks that don't require threading etc... simply use the tried and true Perl.
just my 5x10^10 rubles
COME ON PEOPLE WE NEED TO KEEP THINKING JOB SECURITY!!!
I also think it's funny that Visual Perl is coming out... Who wants to bet it will be called VP++ because of all the M$^%t add ons, doesn't anyone remember what happened with VJ++? Jscript was the only microsoft clone of a language that actually provides cool functionality.
True, we are all gonna die...
"It takes many nails to build a crib, but one screw to fill it."
Perhaps it is the ultimate fate of perl to encompass all standards, making it the single most standard development language! ;)
Geeky modern art T-shirts
is the best thing that could happen to Microsoft. With Win32-API and Win32-GUI both working nicely the OS is much more accessible and programmable. When Microsoft starts shipping Perl as a part of their standard distribution Perl will hit desktops worldwide and its usage will probably increase by an order of magnitude, Win-Win. (Dave Grove may have a heart attack though, Hi Dave! :-))
Just another perl hacker in Bangkok
An excellent article by a man who obviously calls 'em as he sees 'em. The OO paradigm promised to save the world of software engineering from bugs, complexity, and maintenance difficulties, but if the last 5 or 6 years are to be considered as indicators for future performance, it's not worth the hype. Although Perl is often accused of having a "bolted-on" OO interface, the base language is stable, supported, and widely used. Standards will only help to push its acceptance with the suits.
:) In my experience, Perl does just that.
/dev/null and let the language holy wars begin!
Personally, I'd prefer to rely upon a language that delivers on the promise of "write once, run anywhere"
Flames to
It is called Larry Wall.
Getting offtopic, I would like to congratulate BSDi on their plans to bring Java 2 to FreeBSD. After a year of pestering Sun about this, and a few months of bothering IBM, FreeBSD will finally get the Java support it deserves. After the BSDi purchase of Walnut Creek, I often said that perhaps BSDi would put more "corporate" pressure on Sun to release JDK1.2 for FreeBSD, but this is a most unlooked-for and welcome development.
(Now if only they would lower the BSDCon prices... )
And re: "Perl Language Subcommittee" -- I thought that Larry, Randall, and Tom were the committee. ;-)
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I like to watch.
Jason
The ANSI Perl standard recognizes that "there's more than 1 way to do it." Specifically, the standard outlines 123 ways to do it -- see appendix c. Additional methods are "implementation defined."
--Shoeboy
(former microserf)
Good move too, IMO. Anything proprietory will be in the plug-in, ActiveState will own it and why bother to open source the code? They might open the API so people can add cool stuff but plug-ins to Visual Studio are so abundant (30 or so things in there I have no idea what they do) its evident that rocket science it ain't and I'm not sure why you'd bother. :-)) :-)). Stuff like that.
Documentation will be better and newless cluebies won't be posting I clicked on my program but the box closed so fast I donno what happen please help me type questions. Perl doesn't have a GUI, this will do it.
I want a menu item to search for modules and there could be an Active Update, heheheehe check ActiveState for new versions of any modules every time I boot up.
Biggest impact may be a large upsurge in background programs on Win32 doing housekeeping, updating personal news pages, instant flame response forms if someone happens to mention Python on slashdot
Just another perl hacker in Bangkok
Things were were always better in the old days, weren't they?
What you have is a gut feeling that things used to be better because you only remember the good stuff. You remember how great Wing Commander was while forgetting that it took you 3 hours to figure out the config.sys and autoexec.bat for the boot disk.
Now, the specific time frame being discussed is 5-6 years. Would you rather use Windows 95? As for unix, would you rather use SunOS? I remember some epic battles with xf86config under Linux. Was Netscape 1.1 really less buggy than Netscape 4.7?
pornking
The point is, you realize how bad your code really is ;) Hopefully, it will make you a better programmer, even if you very rarely use assembly.
Oh yeah, and the line noise code, well let's just say it can win you prizes (see: Obfuscated Perl Contest, and the IOCCC). Not that I'm encouraging this or anything.
Jeff
His parting message.
Sad. But he and Tom C had one too many flamewars and he has left.
Incidentally Perl has a standard. It is the documentation. The cause of said flamewars is that Tom considers the documentation a standard and Ilya constantly wanted to play around with new features, add new constructs, etc.
Cheers,
Ben
PS Trivia. If $a is an anonymous subroutine then $a->(@args) calls the subroutine with those arguments. This is very useful because $handler{$foo}->($bar) is far cleaner and more understandable than &{$handler{$foo}}($bar). OTOH I am amused that such a nice feature got included in Perl on a bar bet...
My usual seat in the cluetrain is at A HREF="http://pub4.ezboard.com/biwethey.ht