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Perl And Standards: Larry Rosler Interview

Posted by Hemos on from the good-reading dept.

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?"

11 of 74 comments (clear)

  1. Re:Perl Standards by pornking · · Score: 5

    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
  2. Why Perl would benefit from a standard by GGardner · · Score: 5

    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!

  3. Perl & VB by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5
    >>Perl is superior to Visual Basic in every way imaginable.

    This is a completely stupid overgeneralization. VB is great at rapid prototyping of visual apps, and Perl sucks big at it.

  4. No need to standardize by DA_MAN_DA_MYTH · · Score: 4
    I like the fact that a lot of people don't know perl, We don't need to make perl widely accepted...

    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."
  5. The push from Microsoft by yzorderex · · Score: 4

    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
  6. Perl Standards by RTMFD · · Score: 4

    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.

    Personally, I'd prefer to rely upon a language that delivers on the promise of "write once, run anywhere" :) In my experience, Perl does just that.

    Flames to /dev/null and let the language holy wars begin!

    1. Re:Perl Standards by jilles · · Score: 4

      "Maybe I still am missing the boat on OO, but at least I'm in good company. =)"

      Exactly, you just found another guy who missed the boat. This guy is smart enough to not completely dismiss python and java as useless but from the interview it is quite clear that you won't find him programming in either language (to put it mildly).

      For me OO is also something of the past. But at least I'm not stuck in the procedural/machine oriented paradigm of thirty years ago (when OO was the hot new thing). Personally, I find modern ideas such as aspect oriented programming, subject oriented programming or even intentional programming much more interesting.

      Perl is interesting in that sense because it is probably flexible enough to extend it to support either of those. On the other hand its syntax will probably always be a major obstacle for any serious adoption. Also performance is an issue (more than in Java) if you start doing serious development.

      Java at the moment is a much more mature language, perhaps due to the rigorous control of SUN over it. However, I think institutions like ISO mover too slow to keep up with the rapid developments. A standardized version of Java of three years ago would be close to useless to me. I suspect the same goes for perl. Like it or not, SUNs control of the Java language has prevented fragmentation and effectively caused it to be an industry standard with support for a large number of platforms.

      Finally a wise quote:
      "When you have a hammer, every problem seems a nail"

      I think this applies equally to either perl, vb, c(++), java, fill in you're favorite language. When developing device drivers stay away from visual basic. When developing e-commerce websites: don't bother using c. Also beware that languages and their accompanying libraries are under development. Two years ago Java was not good to do anything, now it is rapidly becoming the language of choice for number of domains (most notably web development).

      Don't use one hammer but educate yourself to be able to use the appropriate tools for the job at hand.

      --

      Jilles
  7. There is a perl standard by howard_wwtg · · Score: 4
    There is a Perl standard out there. Has been from the beginning.

    It is called Larry Wall.

  8. evaporating standards by Jafa · · Score: 5
    I thought his comment on evaporating standards was hilarious and sadly right on the mark! To quote:

    1980's paradigm: If it's worth implementing once, it's worth implementing twice.
    1990's paradigm: Ship the prototype!
    2000's paradigm: Ship the idea!

    Jason
  9. The inevitable result of perl standardization... by Shoeboy · · Score: 4

    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)

  10. When I was a youngun... by pornking · · Score: 4


    Things were were always better in the old days, weren't they?

    • Remember how horribly everything broke when dos 4.0 came out?
    • Was Windows 95 really worse than windows3.1?
    • I think the Denver airport has been 5-6 years by now.
    • Every version of Netscape has been riddled with bugs.
    • Is Motif better than GTK?
    • X Windows is the defacto standard for unix displays. Is this really a good thing?
    • Do you actually like the design of NFS?
    • What about MacOS 6?

    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