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Larry Wall's State of the Onion

Posted by Hemos on from the larry-speaks dept.

Anonymous Coward writes "I'm sure I'm not the first to report this, but Perl.com put up a synopsis of Larry Wall's annual report on the state of Perl. "

5 of 93 comments (clear)

  1. perl actually is easy by VAXGeek · · Score: 5

    Perl is actually a very logical language to use to teach beginners. Start out gradual, like:

    $a = "hello world\n";
    print "$a";

    From there, even the casual beginner can progress to (code excerpt taken from slashcode):

    ($p{$_})&6];$p{$_}=/ ^$P/ix?$P:close$_}keys%p}p;map{$p{$_}=~/^[P.]/&&
    close$_}%p;wait until$?;map{/^r/&&}%p;$_=$d[$q];sleep rand(2)if/\S/;print

    As you can see, the syntax is non-threatning even to the most novice of programmers and is very intuitive.

    w00t w00t i g0t r00t w00t w00t w00t

    5 more seconds to go

    w00t w00t w00t w00t w00t w00t w00t w00t


    ------------
    a funny comment: 1 karma
    an insightful comment: 1 karma
    a good old-fashioned flame: priceless

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    this sig limit is too small to put anything good h
  2. Re:Is Perl losing its Perliness? by The+Cunctator · · Score: 5
    No, you're not alone. It's certainly a bold stroke--resembles the Apple migration to OS X. I'm hesitant, but I am pretty trustful of Larry Wall and I'm not too tied to syntax to have my brain collapse at such a drastic change. Change is necessary--and if done with intelligence, even drastic change can be good.

    But with this one, definitely only time will tell.

    --

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    --
    Make mine methylphenidate.

  3. Perl Wars by DarkHelmet · · Score: 5
    After sifting through the overcommented, underhabitated (at least for intellegent life) areas of Slashdot, Luke and CmdrKnbi sped away from contents.pl, across the surface of the search.pl riding Larry Wall's traslation routines. CmdrKnbi had Luke stop at the edge of the code block, overlooking the vast query ?topic=perl.

    "The Perl comments section," said CmdrKnbi. "You will never find a more wretched hive of trolls and Python aficionados. We must be cautious."

    --
    /^[A-Z0-9._%+-]+@[A-Z0-9.-]+\.[A-Z]{2,4}$/i
  4. Is Perl losing its Perliness? by isomeme · · Score: 5
    Having read this summary and both Apocalypses, and as a long-time and ardent Perl user, I must say I'm profoundly uneasy about where Larry is taking Perl 6. Many, many of the proposed changes (for example, the -> ~ . operator modifications mentioned in the article) will both break virtually all existing Perl code, and require fairly fundamental relearning by Perl coders. And yes, I know there's a planned kludge to use syntax to grandfather in P5 modules, but it's ugly and doesn't cover main programs).

    My question is, why? Why mess with so much of Perl? Why break backwards-compatibility across the board? If Larry wants to create a new language, he should go for it, and I'd probably be eager to try it out. But with Perl 6, he seems to be creating a new language and calling it Perl, which strikes me as the worst possible path.

    Am I alone in feeling this way?

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    When all you have is a hammer, everything looks like a skull.
  5. throwing mugs???!? by grammar+nazi · · Score: 5
    Just as long as nobody needs to throw mugs up against the wall during their speeches!

    Regular expressions are very powerful. I'm glad to see that Larry is making good decisions regarding these.

    It's funny. It seems that everybody wants Perl to be more like Ruby or more like Python. Don't they realize that they can just use Ruby or Python? I have professional experience with all three of these languages and I can say that they all provide benefits, leading to a situation where it comes down to the right tool for the right job. I'm afraid that Larry is attempting to turn Perl into something that it isn't. a Jack-of-all-trades-yet-master-of-none which isn't good.

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    Keeping /. free of grammatical errors for ~5 years.