LWN Interviews Larry Wall

dlc writes: "Linux Weekly News interviews Larry Wall. 'Until now, the process of the design of Perl has been evolutionary. It's been done by prototype and modification over time. I talked about becoming stupid, but I've always been stupid. Fortunately I've been just smart enough to realize that I'm stupid.'"

Comments

How do you define a finished programming language?

[quickquack]

This bit from Larry's interview stuck out to me.

CL: Now, since Perl 6 is going to be developed under more organized way, do you expect it to live longer? (Of course, I don't mean Perl 5 is dead, though.)
LW: One of the proposals, one of the RFCs was that Perl 6 should be the last version of Perl. The idea is that if we make Perl 6 sufficiently flexible, then there's no need for Perl 7, because you can always bend the full language into whatever you want it to be.

This poses an interesting question. Once the language can do everything in a sense that it was meant to do (everything but operating systems, pretty much) do you discontinue development? Or do you still tweak it for as much speed as possible? What happens if the enviroment of computers changes enough that perl is just not apt to handling it in its latest version?

Flamewars aside, I don't think that perl development will stop. If Larry Wall stops developing it, then the rest of the perl development group will jump on.

I know I'm going to get modded down for this, but I'd like to hear some other's opinions.
------------