Ask Larry Wall

About what? Perl is probably a good topic choice. No one knows more about Perl than Larry Wall, right? We'll send 10 of the highest-moderated questions to Larry by email, and post his answers when we get them back. Note: Due to Slashdot's line length restrictions, lines of code over 50 characters long may not display correctly. Please be aware of this if you include code samples in your question.

Comments

Rewind and replay

[ObviousGuy]

If you were to have a second chance at designing Perl, what would you have done differently?

It's clear that Perl is undergoing a huge revision now, but even in the midst of this, you have to refrain from straying too far from the existing userbase. What would you do if you didn't have to satisfy those people?

Re:Rewind and replay

[wdr1]

If you were to have a second chance at designing Perl, what would you have done differently?

Isn't Perl 5 the answer to that? Perl 5 was Larry's rewrite of Perl, and Perl 6 is to be the communities (hence the RFCs, etc.)

It's clear that Perl is undergoing a huge revision now, but even in the midst of this, you have to refrain from straying too far from the existing userbase.

Heh. You must not have heard about the new regular expression syntax. ;-)

-Bill

James Joyce

[fm6]

If he were still alive, and were writing software instead of fiction, would he program in Perl?

No, this is not a Troll! It seems to me that Perl is as much about expressiveness as it is about creating software.

Re:James Joyce

[bsDaemon]

Either Perl or Lisp. I think either would fill his stream of conscienceness.

Re:James Joyce

[pokeyburro]

"Stream of conscienceness"? I keep trying to think of a riff off of this, but I can't for some reason. Maybe my stream of consciousness is dammed. 8^)

Re:James Joyce

[Zordak]

If he were still alive, and were writing software instead of fiction, would he program in Perl?

If he were still alive and writing bad software instead of bad fiction, I would do the world a favor and shoot him myself. All of his software would be written in INTERCAL, for which he would think himself very clever, and Computer Science and Engineering professors everywhere would waste entire semesters forcing students to decipher it because it would be considered a "masterwork" of software.

Re:James Joyce

[fm6]

Today's Sesame Street was brought to you by the number e

That actually makes sense, since e is natural and irrational.

Perl vs J2EE

[Anonymous Coward]

What do you think about the argument that Perl is a good language for small/medium sized websites and Java/J2EE is what should be used for large enterprise websites??

Perl's Roots...

[jeffy124]

We all know perl was born because you couldnt get something to work right using awk. I'm curious - what could awk not do that implored your self-proclaimed laziness to go off and design Perl?

Re:Perl's Roots...

[rsd]

AWK couldn't handle opening and closing multiple files at that time.

This is answered in Chapter 27 page 645-647 of the camel book.

Please let's keep with questions not answered already.

Perl as a "scripting" or a "programming" language

[Marx_Mrvelous]

I've been using perl for a very long time, but primarily as a scripting language. I indeed mostly use it for extraction and reporting. With the recent developments in perl, however, there seems to be the trend that perl is able to do much, much more (while retaining compatibility to be "just" a scripting language).

What do you think about how people are using Perl today? Are you satisfied that most people use it for simple tasks like log parsing? Would you like to see more advanced applications being built with Perl verses a compiled language?

Other linguas?

[PDHoss]

What language do you use when you're not using Perl? ;) Seriously, are there aspects of other languages you've considered adding to Perl? If so, what languages? What features?

PDHoss

Re:Other linguas?

[Tablizer]

What language do you use when you're not using Perl?

Larry always seemed like a COBOL guy to me :-)

What 10 Q's would you ask yourself?

[thaigan]

If given the chance, what 10 questions would you ask yourself?

Open source and money

[hackstraw]

Larry,

Thanks for Perl and the excellent Camel Book. I've been using Perl for 7 years now and am very grateful for having such a tool at my disposal.

Now for the question. Many times people ask the question "Does open source software pay?", and I am under the assumption that it has for you with the profits from the Camel Book and the Perl Resource Kit, etc. So has OSS been profitable for you?

PS, I miss the Hmm..... and other funny comments while applying patches :)

Re:Open source and money

[Tablizer]

Many times people ask the question "Does open source software pay?", and I am under the assumption that it has for you with the profits from the Camel Book and the Perl Resource Kit, etc. So has OSS been profitable for you?

Almost anything "pays" when you are a celebrity in that area. Most musicians and artists are poor if they don't have other day jobs (although I hear they get laid alot despite that, and that is their primary pay).

Thus, if you are thinking of starting a new language called "Hackstraw" and being an OSS bigshot, then buy some lottery tickets first.

Do OSS for fun and satisfaction and skills, not fame and fortune.

I am just the blunt messenger.

1. Make a new OSS language
2. Collect panties
3. ?????
4. Profit!

Line Length

[carrier lost]

Due to Slashdot's line length restrictions, lines of code over 50 characters long may not display correctly.

Isn't this something that can be fixed in Perl?

MjM

I only mod up...

Re:Line Length

[Neon Spiral Injector]

I believe it was "fixed" with Perl already. Keeps people from forcing the page to scroll horizontally by putting a long unbroken line of text.

000000000111111111122222222223333333333444444444 45 555555555
123456789012345678901234567890123456789 01234567890 123456789

Re:Line Length

[jesser]

Due to Slashdot's line length restrictions, lines of code over 50 characters long may not display correctly.

Isn't this something that can be fixed in Perl?

No. It can only be fixed by reducing the use of the <TABLE> tag and then turning off word-length restrictions.

One of the evil things about using tables for layout is that it forces you to use word-length restrictions on text content and width restrictions on image content. Tables expand when there is a single long word. Since all of the comments are in a single table, one 9000px-long word in a comment causes other paragraphs, even paragraphs in other comments, to wrap at 9000px instead of at the edge of the browser window. Without layout tables, the long word would still make a horizontal scrollbar appear, but other comments would wrap at the edge of the screen as if there had been no scrollbar-forcing comment.

For some other problems with table layouts, see my comment at webmasterworld. Note that tables are great for tabular data, but using them for layout at the same time makes them less useful for tabular data.

One other advantage of using CSS rather than tables is especially applicable to Slashdot: over a slow connection, users of older browsers such as IE 6 for Windows would be able to see the first comment without waiting for the rest of the comments to load. Mozilla can display comments one at a time despite the table-heavy layout, but last time I checked, it could only do so in Slashdot's light mode.

In Slashdot light mode, fixing the page-expanding-comment problem may be as simple as removing a single table tag. In heavy mode, it requires rewriting the layout to replace several layers of nested tables with divs and CSS. (Examples of existing light and heavy modes: light, heavy.) You can use the "block structure" web development bookmarklet to give each table a border (blue, green, or red depending on nesting level) if you want to see how the tables are nested without digging through the HTML source.

Perl Beginners

[KoopaTroopa]

I'm a CS student who's recently become very interested in Perl along with other languages. However, I don't really have too much everyday (or even occasional) need to actually USE much Perl. I am big into learning as much as I can about it for its own sake.

Now, for the question: Given this approach to learning Perl (just for a general working knowledge, maybe light usage,) is it really worth spending a lot of my time learning Perl now, or should I wait for the big Perl 6 revision?

Thanks :)

Re:Perl Beginners

[TibbonZero]

Try it with CGI, you will have far better experiences using Perl vs using C++ or whatever you are using now.
In addition, try it for day to day administrative tasks (assuming that you are running Linux or BSD...)
Make web pages, make scripts, make a few small games, try to see what you can do. Since you are a CS student, analyze the code, and try to trace all of Perl through (that's a task). It will make you better off for it. Try to program a CGI module or something if that proved too easy.
I would say learn it now, I know that Perl 6 is a big one, but it's still Perl, and the difference won't even be as big as the one between C and C++.

Re:Perl Beginners

[sinserve]

If you are not going to use everyday, don't bother learning it. The P in "Perl"
stands for practical.

Perl doesn't have much linguistic inovations of it is own, it is just a reimplementation
of ages old techniques. The much celebrated syntax is lifted straight up from unix shell
and it is stream manipulating siblings (sed, awk, et al.) That is where the funny $@% prefixes
come from (we know @ is straight from Lisp's backquote and array splicing syntax, much used with
Lisp macros.) The regular expressions are nothing but Lex on steroids, I almost always rewrite
my production perl code with regexes in C and it is very easy to do this, I don't even write C,
I just write Lex rules in a lexfile and implement the case handlers in simple C.

Perl is cool when you are a newbie coder who knows nothing but C/C++/Java, because those languages
are expensive to "set up". You need alot of support code just to implement the simplest ideas.
Perl has alot of things built in; high level data structures, memory management, clean string
manipulation utilities, networking, GUI and more libraries than you can shake a stick at.

But you know what? Perl is only AWESOME because we -as student programmers- were introduced to
very low level languages in school, and don't have any ideas there exists extremely powerful
laguages, with elegant syntaxes to die for.

If you just want to learn about perl's "innovations", I invite you to learn Smalltalk, Prolog, or
Lisp. Mostly Lisp.

Re:Perl Beginners

[spencerogden]

The point is that 99% of tasks, especially online, don't need the speed of C/C++, so you are better off saving developer time by using a higher level language.

Re:Perl Beginners

[rgmoore]

Anyone who says that using perl is easier than using C++ do to any task that requires load is an woefully uneducated C++ programmer.

I'm not sure if that's necessarily true. When people have done benchmarks of text-heavy tasks on programs written in Perl vs. ones written in lower level languages, they've frequently found that the Perl performed better. This seems like it shouldn't be possible- the Perl interpreter is written in C, so it's hard to see how Perl could outperform native C- but the answer is that Perl has been optimized to within an inch of its life. The Perl string functions are much better written than what most programmers would be able to create themselves, so programs written in Perl may well be more efficient than what those programmers would have written.

Re:Perl Beginners

[joto]

Obviously, the easiest is to spend your money on some hardware.

But usually, when it comes to text-processing, you can have your cake and eat it too. Have you ever tried to do some text-processing with C++ iostreams? They are dead slow, to the point where you can probably match 100's of Perl regexps while waiting for a simple "cin >> myint" to execute. At least that's my experience with g++ on linux.

So, in reality, you can write a fast Perl program easily, writer a much slower C++ program somewhat less easily, or spend a lot of time writing optimized specialized I/O-routines in C++ for the task at hand.

Why is this so? Perl is optimized for text-processing, and uses smart hand-coded C. C++ iostreams aren't optimized for anything but safety and convenience. I would like C++ to be faster, but in reality it isn't for this kind of task (unless you spend a huge amount of time rewriting the standard libraries).

Re:Perl Beginners

[crawling_chaos]

The P in "Perl" stands for practical.

Or Pathological. Particularly in the 11th hour of and all-night debugging session. I still prefer Pathologically Eclectic Rubbish Lister as the translation. Particularly with the quality (cough) of the data I'm passing through it.

Re:Perl Beginners

[jgerman]

Yeah, I'd like to know who the people are who are doing these benchmarks. I can tell you from a reasonably large amount of experience that that is simply not true. Perl is great, I love it, but I can always beat it with vanilla C. When I need something quick I use Perl, when I need that something to be fast I use C. If I want it to be slow to write and slow to run I use java ;) ( I kid Java it's definitely grown on me in the past couple of months). The truth is that any good programmer would have the same results. Yes Perl is optimized, and remarkably so, but that won't beat writing optimized code in C. The virtue of being able to tailor certain parts of a program, say for example reading data into an array is enough to give you the edge. It all boils down to the right tool for the right job.

I should add though, that I did experience the situation you described, Perl was beating my C program. The answer of course is not to conclude that Perl is faster at text jobs, but to figure out where you went wrong in your C code. Here's a helpful hint: You can pick up some tricks by figuring out how Perl does the things it does.

Perl and slashdot

[larry bagina]

Note: Due to Slashdot's line length restrictions, lines of code over 50 characters long may not display correctly. Please be aware of this if you include code samples in your question.

Do you have any suggestions for improving SLASH?

My Question

[SpanishInquisition]

Do you think that Perl the fact that Perl is so easy to learn and alows a lot of "Baby Talk" is a disavantage in the workplace were it makes a good programmer indistinguishable from a amateur wannabe. Compare that to Java where even if you just want to print "Hello World" you have to understand inheritance, polymorphism and static class methods. Would a Perl certification help give managers that fuzzy feeling of security?

What do you feel about the future of Perl?

[TibbonZero]

What do you feel about the future of Perl? Where is it moving to, and what still has to be done?
Do you see Perl moving towards ever being a greater language for "programming" as C++ is? Or is it's place pretty well defined and not moving?
In addition, what do you think about other languages and systems such as the .NET and XML? Do you see them as being possibly sucessful in light of Perl's flexiblity? There are so many languages and standards out there, it's hard to see what will some to the top.

Structured programming and perl

[slashnot007]

The reason I like perl is it is not a structured programming language. In my work I find it is 50% a get the job done parsing language and 25% sequencer of programs and deamons and 25% major ojbect oriented programming effort often a cgi.

Thus I worry that perl has Python-envy. I've tried to use python several times but always go back to perl. The reason is my daily need for a parser dominates my choice of language and maintains my fluency, since I dont want to have to be fluent in both, perl becomes my language of choice for advanced tasks too, even though python might be better for strcutrued programming.

So my question is, is perl 6 making make perl a structued language like python? Would it be a good idea if perl did not develop any further for fear of becoming too complicated and thus disorganized. (witness the evolution of java from clean slate to giant mess with intricate redundant libraries half of which are deprecated).

Re:Structured programming and perl

[Junks Jerzey]

The reason I like perl is it is not a structured programming language.

What could you possibly be talking about here? If Perl isn't structured programming--and it most certainlt is, with it's structured if, for, sub, and unless statements--then what is it exactly?

(I want to say they you don't understand the term "structured programming" but I'm witholding judgement.)

How many ducks

[Anonymous Coward]

How many average sized ducks can fit into a two car garage. I need to know quick.

Re:How many ducks

[Alsee]

Laden or unladen?

-

Re:How many ducks

[fanatic]

Are those European ducks or African ducks?

Re:How many ducks

[scrytch]

> Laden or unladen?

binladen

(someone had to say it)

How Object-Oriented is Perl

[Pinball Wizard]

Larry, Perl has been accused of not being object-oriented because it only supports one of The Three Pillars(encapsulation, the other two being inheritance and polymorphism) of Object-Oriented programming.

In my experience having the programming language handle the complexities of the object type is just as good as having explicit types like int, float, string, etc. But others disagree. And, I'm sure that by creating packages that call other packages, inheritance can be simulated. Others would disagree with this as well.

Additionally, the people who criticize Perl's object-orientedness claim that Object-Oriented programming is "bolted on" to Perl, and therefore is somehow unnatural compared to a language like Java which is built to be object-oriented from the ground up.

How would you answer these critics, and how well does Perl in fact support Object-Oriented Programming, in your opinion?

Re:How Object-Oriented is Perl

[gorilla]

Perl handles inheritance. It's not ideal, because subclasses have to know about their parent classes to avoid stomping on the parent's private data.

Re:How Object-Oriented is Perl

[shoppa]

Perl has been accused of not being object-oriented because it only supports one of The Three Pillars(encapsulation, the other two being inheritance and polymorphism)

I disagree with the above entirely. Perl OO is excellent at inheritance and polymorphism, and it's not so good if you're anal-retentive about encapsulation.

You can do effective encapsulation in Perl, but it's a bit like driving your car wearing handcuffs that you've decided to put on yourself.

OO Perl inheritance and polymporhism are wonderful compared to, say, C++ or Java. The lack of compile-time checking gives you incredible flexibility.

Re:How Object-Oriented is Perl

[geekoid]

How would you answer these critics...

with a smack upside there heads...

Python and Ruby

[millibit]

Which language do you prefere between Python and Ruby?

Why Perl?

[Alizarin Erythrosin]

Why would you pick Perl over other web (or even shell) scripting languages like PHP, ASP or any of the others?

Re:Why Perl?

[ichimunki]

You listed two tasks and two different languages-- so reason #1 to use Perl over those others is so that you don't have to learn a new programming language each time you get a new problem domain. Just a thought... and personally I'd use Ruby over Perl for both of the above because it has all the compactness and power with absolutely none of the line noise.

Re:Why Perl?

[Bingo Foo]

Oh yeah, who does that? Perl is also open source, and can be turned into an MS Exchange Server clone should you desire to do that.

Poem

[TrumpetPower!]

What's your favorite Perl poem?

Cheers,

b&

P.S. Thanks for creating something as wonderful as Perl! b&

Languages in general

[nburtner]

Mr. Wall,
I know that you are an amateur linguist, since you originally wanted to be a missionary, and I was just wondering what other languages that you know and how they influenced your design of perl. I believe that you mentioned in the Camel that Greek was one of the languages that you drew from, and I was just wondering about the others you used, and why you chose them.

Thanks!

Re:Languages in general

[Tablizer]

I was just wondering what other languages that you know and how they influenced your design of perl. I believe that you mentioned in the Camel that Greek was one of the languages that you drew from

That was probably just a joke. You know, "It all looks like Greek to me."

Of course, now people tend to leave the "r" out.

Re:Development Story

[shaldannon]

you can find that in the Llama book, the Camel book, and elsewhere; basically he was working on a text parsing project, sed and awk weren't up to his task, so he started to write his own tool. Indications are that somewhere in the pre-1.0 stage he completely altered the syntax, breaking everyone's programs, and some of them have yet to forgive him for doing that.

directions for perl

[Lumpy]

I use and Love perl for a myriad of tasks... from website scripting to core business app frontends to SQL databases to embedded system programming.

I absolutely love perl based on the fact that you HAVE to give out the source... It's just works that way...

what is your opinion on these up an coming perl compilers? do you feel it's onyl about obfuscating and trying to lock down a perl program jsut to make a buck or try and avoid being Open Source? what are your feelings about peopl's efforts to try and make a perl program closed source this way?

language comparison

[relay_mod]

How do you think Perl compares to languages such as Ruby, Python, or Lua? Where do you think Perl has its strengths, when these other languages are accounted for?

what next now?

[tanveer1979]

Larry, I am a perl user for quite sometime now, infact in many organizations like us perl is the defacto language for scripting. And I feel Perl has reached a pinnacle. Perl as such will be difficult to improve. Of course better regex and such minor issues can be fixed, but for all that matters I waould call it perfect, so do you plan to branch into something completly differnt, yet on the same philosophy. Perhaps perl with more intution, more power, an altogether differnt language with the same underlying philosophy of perl?

What will you *not* put into Perl 6?

[TreyHarris]

What would you say has been the number one requested feature that you will not put into Perl 6, and why not?

perl vs other languages

[larry bagina]

Whenever perl pops up in slashdot, there are plenty of language zealots claiming perl is obsolete and you should really be using php or ruby or python instead.

What are your thoughts on these other scripting languages? What do you like about them, what do you dislike?

Re:perl vs other languages

[elmegil]

I came to perl because it was a powerful way to do things and didn't take me a huge long time to do them. However, I've recently found that PHP works much more intuitively and clearly for "active html" as opposed to perl cgi. Perhaps mod_perl might do the same for me, but honestly, I've already got mod_php loaded by default and it works great.

This is not to say that perl is obsolete, but php sure is a lot easier to use in that particular niche.

LOTR

[baldass_newbie]

In the Camel Book, you mention Tolkien's Lord of the Rings as good background reading for Perl.
Do you think the Peter Jackson movies are an acceptable alternative? Or do I have to read the books?

Re:LOTR

[twoshortplanks]

More importantly, camel three says "The Lord of the Rings by J.R.R. Tolkien (most recent printing: Houghton Mifflin, 1999)." Does it really have to be the most recent printing?

(The Perl CD Bookshelf and grep are cool toys to have)

Re:LOTR

[geekoid]

depends, are you writing PERL, or writing making a PERL movie?

Re:LOTR

[twoshortplanks]

That depends...do I look like a farmer to you?

(This joke refers to: this movie.)

Perl Class?

[RollyGuy]

At the college level, the programming classes are taught using C,C++,Java, etc. Do you see a place for perl being taught in the classroom? I find that it is often overlooked and dismissed as simply a scripting language.

Re:Perl Class?

[PythonOrRuby]

Of course, the fact that Perl simplifies the low-level stuff can encourage teaching in a top-down fashion.

It's actually a lot like Java - which has been widely embraced for teaching intro CS - in this way. Students learning Java don't worry about little stuff like how strings work. It's enough to know that they work, and students can focus on the higher-level logic of their program. The only difference is that Perl is usually quicker to type.

Why Perl?

[wackysootroom]

Just to set the record straight, I use whatever language that I think will be the best tool for the job.

Larry, my question to you is why should I use PERL over Python for system administration? Why should I use PERL over PHP for web content? What do you think that PERL is best suited for?

Aside from programming

[fruey]

-either-
What are your favorite things that have Perl or Pearl in them, either literally or figuratively? e.g. Pearl jam, Oysters, etc...? Please don't say Slashdot :)
-or-
Did your naming of Perl have anything to do with a linguistic memory of someone dear to you who used the word pearl in sentences such as "oh... he/she is a real pearl (of a person)"

Perl and .NET

[prostoalex]

What is your opinion of .NET in general and Perl's role in it? Given that .NET supports Perl as one of the languages would you recommend actually using it for any projects? Do you see good future for this tandem?

Re:Perl and .NET

[mcc]

I would like to ask the following as kind of a rider on the parent question:

From looking at perl 6, it really and honestly seems to me like the perl 6 team is trying to position itself as a competitor to .NET, or at least mono. Specifically, Parrot as it's been described in the apocalypses looks like a natural replacement for the .NET CLR, as a more abstract and thus powerful VM that will let objects from different languages interact with each other seamlessly, without being neutered/"managed" the way that CLR languages have to be in order to fit the C# object model.

Is this an accurate assessment? Was perl 6 meant to be a "better" CLR, and are you people intending to market it as such? If so, do you think that perl 6 could seriously compete with the .NET CLR or the JVM-- given that while those two may be a bit behind in the virtual machine department, they come with really complicated tightly-integrated framework APIs (J2EE, swing, the .net framework..) whereas perl just has a bunch of assorted disorganized modules that do everything?

Can it be honestly said that perl 6 is a threat to .NET?

Re:Perl and .NET

[PythonOrRuby]

From what I've seen, the .NET CLR is biased towards statically-typed languages, while Parrot's goal was to run dynamically-typed languages like Perl6(and Python, Ruby, Tcl, etc.) better.

So I think they can live side by side. Also, with the runtime environment for Perl6 developed as a distinct VM, it becomes quite possible to write a Parrot -> .NET/JVM bytecode translator.

Concurrent/Distributed tasks

[sergio]

Larry,

One of the limitations that I have found on Perl is
its lack of modern concurrent processing support in
the form of a standard stable threads package (yes, there is ithreads) or some way to make Perl modules execute and comunicate remotely (nope, rsh* won't do, neither is SOAP the solution)

More and more other languages are providing mechanisms or libraries of modules that are standard in their distribututions.

I would like to know what kind of ideas you would have in this area. Do you think that Perl needs to
have this capability as a standard component?

Thanks for all the fun!

Re:Concurrent/Distributed tasks

[twoshortplanks]

First up, have you seen the thread support in Perl 5.8.0? It's documented here if you want to look at it. Exactly what do you think is wrong with it? It's in the core. It's stable. I'm not goading, I just want to know what you think is missing.

Secondly, what's wrong with SOAP? SOAP::Lite works really well and is darn simple to use. Is it too slow? What's your main critisms of it? Other object Persistance frameworks exist (which are in turn used to do distributed transferal of objects. One I'm currently looking at is Pixie which attempts to semitransparently seralise data structures and objects to and from memory and a database (i.e. it's an OODB) (it essentailly works the same way Java does - it does most of it nativly but you can put hooks in if you want)

Do you really think all of this should be in the core? What is core anyway? Since it's often as simple as "perl -MCPAN -e 'install module::name'", how much do you want to force to be shipped with every single copy of perl?

Re:Concurrent/Distributed tasks

[GutBomb]

Look, you said it, 5.8.0 -- THERE IS A .0 AT THE END!!! How well tested it it?

5.8.5 is really 5.8.5.0
there will always be a zero at the end. your logic is flawed.

Re:Concurrent/Distributed tasks

[twoshortplanks]

How about the fact that CPAN won't work with it,

What do you mean by this? That the CPAN shell won't work with it? Yes, it does. That modules from CPAN won't work? In the majority they do. I'm not sure what you mean by "won't work." Give me something I can answer to.

and I wouldnt put money on mod_perl working with it either.

How much?

Re:Concurrent/Distributed tasks

[twoshortplanks]

It seems form your comments that you haven't done any large scale enterprise programming.

If you want to discuss Perl then I can do that. I can't be arsed to reply to comments attacking me. The world is too short for flamewars.

The REAL question

[unicron]

Mr. Wall,

Your campaign seems to have the momentum of a freight train. Why are you so popular?

Re:The REAL question

[DAldredge]

Maybe, just maybe, because Perl is a fun language to program in???

Missionaries

[technoCon]

WARNING: a Christian topic follows. Close your eyes and stop your ears if that bothers you.

I hear that Mr. Wall once wanted to be a missionary translator but that a chronic health problem prevented him from going someplace foreign. I further hear that missionary translators use Perl a lot.

Has he heard any cool stories about how missionaries use Perl?

Would he ever want to do a short-term missionary gig?

How is his health nowadays?

Dear Larry: Are you crazy?

[Scareduck]

Having read some of the more recent Apocalypses, I have a question for you: are you crazy? The regexp changes you're talking about in Apocalypse 5 will make Perl 6 deeply incompatible with existing scripts and practice. In particular, I object to the conversion of [] to non-capturing grouping rather than character class. As a long-time user of Perl, I have to say this is insane. You're wrong when you say "we're really simplifying" -- you're making things more complex. Changing this breaks Perl and much more; why do you think you're immune from the negative side-effects of hubris? And it is hubris. We know this because you start page 2 of the Apocalypse by saying, "Regex culture has gone wrong in a variety of ways...." One of Issawi's Laws of Progress says that society (even Perl regexp culture) is a mule, not a car -- if pressed too hard, it will kick an throw off its rider. Something this radical and wrong will hurt Perl 6 adoption and will retard the acceptance of some very nifty features.

Re:Dear Larry: Are you crazy?

[legLess]

Yowza. Blockquothe the Scareduck:

The regexp changes you're talking about in Apocalypse 5 [perl.com] will make Perl 6 deeply incompatible with existing scripts and practice. ...Something this radical and wrong will hurt Perl 6 adoption and will retard the acceptance of some very nifty features.

First of all, in case you missed it, one of the explicit design goals of Perl 6 is to run Perl 5 code perfectly and with no changes. If you don't want to use Perl 6 features - don't. End of story.

This makes your pithy Issawi quote pointless. Larry's not pushing the Perl mule, he's giving riders a choice of a new, different mule that many of them will like better. If you feel pushed - again, keep writing Perl 5.

Larry's said several times that he's going to break everything that needs to be broken, mercilessly, in the design of Perl 6. Only those to whom this appeals need come along for the ride. I think your hysteria is misplaced.

Re:Dear Larry: Are you crazy?

[buttahead]

There is an option in the new rx to turn on perl5 rx parsing and forgo the new perl6 parsing (or rather perl uses the perl6 engine to convert the perl5 rx into a perl6 rx, I beleive). For those that are too lazy to learn a new and improved rx engine, this should be a nice substitute. As for the incompatibility issues, stick to using perl5 for legacy apps, and use perl6 for the new ones. This is as easy as changing a single char at the top of a perl script from 5 to 6.

A more gradual change in this case seems impossible. Adding bit by bit caused many of the problems with the current rx implementation. The new way has been thought out, rather than hodge-podged.

I don't know Issawi, but he sounds like he has problems accepting change. Adapt and overcome.

Re:Dear Larry: Are you crazy?

[rgmoore]

I think that you're overreacting. Larry has specifically mentioned that there will be a Perl5 compatibility mode. Just put a :p5 after your matching character (m or s) and you can do things the old way. Meanwhile, those of us who want to do non-capturing groups can now use [...] instead of (?...), and for defined groups can use <[...]> instead of [...]. As Larry says, which do you use more, non-capturing groups or non-named character classes? Note that at the same time you're gaining the very powerful ability to create your own named character classes, so when you have an odd group of characters that you want to use again and again it won't be a problem.

Re:Dear Larry: Are you crazy?

[Ian Bicking]

You're wrong when you say "we're really simplifying" -- you're making things more complex.

I think Scareduck is right here. Backward-compatibility modes will not make Perl, the totality, less complex; quite the contrary. Going forward there will be two significant different syntaxes for regexes, with the potential for great confusion if you don't know which one you are using. It also means two syntaxes to learn, with false cognates that are more likely to confuse than if the syntaxes were radically different.

The old syntaxes for Perl are not going anywhere. By introducing new syntaxes, Larry is making Perl syntax twice as complex. It is already known as a syntactically complex language.

If this quote isn't entirely ontopic for this discussion, it certainly is for Perl as a whole:

"I thought that it was a firm principle of language design -- out of concern for programming as a human activity -- that in all respects equivalent programs should have few possibilities for different representation [...]. Otherwise completely different styles of programming arise unnecessarily, thereby hampering maintainability, readability and what have you. This requires from the language designers the courage to make up their minds!"
-- Edsger W. Dijkstra on Ada (source)

Not only didn't Larry make up his mind the first time around, but now that the creation has settled he's changing it all over again.

Re:Dear Larry: Are you crazy?

[Scareduck]

Thanks for putting this much more clearly than I've been able to. Unfortunately, there have been several correspondants on this issue who feel that compatability modes will fix this problem. I disagree, and suggest they will make the situation worse.

Re:Dear Larry: Are you crazy?

[tswinzig]

As Larry says, which do you use more, non-capturing groups or non-named character classes?

Non-named character classes, ten-fold.

Thanks for asking!

From a project managers prospective ...

[mustangdavis]

What are your thoughts on the comments made by people that Perl is not designed for projects that require more than one programmer? Many people have stated over and over again that Perl code can not be managed by more than one person ... what are your thoughts on that statement? How would you manage a large Perl project? Do you think Perl should be used for large projects? (or should it be used strictly as a "quick and dirty" programming language?) BTW: I love your work (someone had to say it)

Re:From a project managers prospective ...

[seanadams.com]

What are your thoughts on the comments made by people that Perl is not designed for projects that require more than one programmer?

Hogwash. Our project includes over 25,000 lines of perl, and more than a dozen people have worked on it. I've found that (in stark contrast to big C projects I've worked on) Perl is actually an outstanding language for large development teams.

The same features which make perl powerful for single-developer projects (dense syntax, "bug resistant" operators, loose types, etc.) also make it easy for many developers to work together. You don't have to be constantly checking the APIs to see if some function takes an int or a float, or what the restrictions on string length are, etc.

Perl has gotten a bad rap for being a write-only language. Well, that's entirely because so many programmers have used it as such. Perl is flexible. It won't stop you from writing really shitty code that only you can maintain. It also won't stop you from writing beautiful, easy-to-read code that a large team can manage with ease.

Why I learned Perl

[A nonymous Coward]

Used to write hardware diagnostics, on VME and Multibus cards in a chassis; one master card, many test cards. Master reported errors over a serial line, and over 15 years the format had gradually changed. Any 24 hour run could have a real stray dog variety of error reports. I needed to analyze the output for patterns, and tried using awk, sed, sort, etc. It was an incredible pain what with all the subtle variations from board to board. After two weeks struggling with awk, sed, sort, I tried Perl, I think Perl 4 at the time, and within a couple of days had learned enough of the language to do the entire job.

PERL, XP, and test-driven development

[phamlen]

One of the big methodologies in vogue at the moment is eXtreme Programming and closely-related Test-driven Development (where you write your tests before writing your code.)

Considering that XP is a "high-discipline, low formality" methodology, how do you think XP and Perl fit together? How would you go about doing test-driven development in Perl? Is Perl a good language for XP?

-Peter

Re:Perl, XP, and test-driven development

[chromatic]

Perl has fairly good testing support, if you choose to use it. Writing a refactoring browser for Perl is non-trivial, but test first development is possible. I do it regularly.

Issues left in Perl6?

[Jeppe Salvesen]

Mr. Wall

Are there any issues in Perl that will not be fixed in Perl6? By an "issue" I mean an aspect of the language that is being widely critized and is admittedly suboptimally implemented, like the current OO implementation.

Application

[Whispers_in_the_dark]

What application of Perl most suprised/pleased/amused you when you discovered Perl's use in that role?

Perl6 + Unicoded Operators = APL?

[NZheretic]

In memory of the original python/perl parrot

Despite your major efforts at rationalization, Perl6 looks to be just as, if not more complex than Perl5 when it comes to the human readers interpretation of the meaning of the combinations of punctuation marks, brackets, etc in Perl6 source code.

Why not just be done with the concept of multi-punctuation operators and just map the each of the operators into one of the many single Unicode characters available. Imagine the money the Perl institute could make from the sale of keyboards.

creative muse

[nerpdawg]

How do you go about getting ideas for/stoking the creative muse for doing language design?

Re:My Question

[shoppa]

I'm not Larry, but I'll give my answer:

Perl newbies are obvious. They don't take advantage of hash keys, and generally write Perl just like they were coding in C (e.g. if/then/else to do multi-way cases, lack of good exception handling, for(;;) loops when a foreach loop is much more clear, etc.)

They also "re-invent the wheel" with everything where an obvious CPAN module application would have made life easier for everyone involved.

Role of Religion?

[Anonymous Cowdog]

Larry,

I remember reading at some point that you are a
Christian, and there have been suggestions that
some of your early missionary impulses (a desire
to do good, help others) are perhaps part of the
zeal you have put into Perl over the years.

Preferring a scientific view, I am not religious,
and have no desire to be. Perhaps there is a
God, but if there is, I think he/she has no
opposable thumbs; in other words, has no power to
change anything; reality is just playing out
according to the laws of physics (whatever those
are).

Please tell us how in the world a scientific or
at least technical mind can believe in God,
and what role religion has played in your
work on Perl.

Thanks for doing this interview, and thanks
for Perl!

Re:Role of Religion?

[Phroggy]

This book may interest you.

Re:Role of Religion?

[i_want_you_to_throw_]

Interesting post on use.perl.org

I remember when I became a buddhist I was told that the most important thing one can do and the best way to live a good life was to take refuge in the buddha, the dharma and the sangha. I have recently began to see how this parallel works with the perl community.

Buddha himself was not a god and will not ever be. Buddha was a simple monk who achieved what every man can achieve, enlightenment. When entering a shrine room it is part of the Mahayana tradition to prostrate before the buddha as a symbol of respect. One does not prostrate to buddha as an external deity, one prostrates to what buddha represents: the ability to become enlightened. What you could be. Take refuge in the fact that you can become enlightened. Respect your inner buddha.

Many of us think of Larry Wall as the ubergeek, and published reports would have us believe that he doesn't particularly care for this designation as the god king of perl. Larry also loves the commonly perceived enemy, Microsoft. "Your friend is your enemy and your enemy is your friend". Thankfully that quote has not expired yet. It's a ridiculous notion that Microsoft is the devil. Microsoft only wants happiness as we do. There are many in the Microsoft camp whose actions do not match this but then again I'm sure that Microsoft could point out to us members of our own Perl ranks who think that Microsoft can only do wrong. Larry wants this to work on Microsoft and serves as an excellent role model. Larry is like buddha in that respect. Compassion and understanding for ones perceived enemies is important. Microsoft seems to be a favorite but as one extraordinarily wise member of our ranks pointed out at YAPC2001, there are things to learn from other communities particularly Python. This bring us to our next point..

Taking refuge in the dharma. Taking refuge in the dharma means that there is a wealth of information in the teachings of our community that you should call upon should you need an answer. We have ALL been here. One particularly nice piece of work is the Perl Cookbook. Should you need help traversing a hash or reading a file backwards by line or paragraph, it's there. In buddhism, trails of spiritualism have been blazed by the masters before and like those trails, so paths to other problems have been figured out for you by perl mongers that have such a knowledge of code that to call them perl monks would be understating it. People such as Damian Conway, Ziggy, Nat Torkington, Randall Schwartz, and Lincoln Stein have all achieved perl lama status for the knowledge they demonstrate in their writings. Taking refuge in the dharma should begin with you amassing as many of these books as you can. Firstly because they are perl dharma teachings that will serve you well and secondly because it's your duty to support your community. If you think to yourself "I wish I could help the community as these guys have helped me" then support these same folks by buying their books and stocking your book shelf. Go to half.com and get them if you have to. If nothing else you can give the illusion that you are really smart while you are working towards perl enlightenment.

For our discussion dharma in our community represents many things. CPAN is probably the best example. I recently had a need for sending an ICQ message recently from a script. Luckily for me Jeremy Muhlich had the same problem and not only solved it, but was thoughtful enough to make a module so that others could have an easier time of it. Mr. Muhlich didn't have to be this nice. Now consider that there are thousands of modules there now and that there are at least hundreds of developers that were equally thoughtful as Mr. Muhlich. Hundreds of developers and they all thought enough to put it out there to make YOUR life easier. Can you think of any other group of people that would do this? Oh sure there are those groups that can pay lip service to this idea but to see it in practice is something different.

Then there's the sangha, or Perl Mongers. Once a month, pay the visit and you will find that there is much to learn. Being an active participant is an also an exercise in ego reduction. Here's an experiment that not only will help you be a better programmer but a better person: bring your code to a Perl Mongers meeting, and let your fellow mongers ridicule you in front of your peers. It NEVER happens that way at these meetings. When you put away that programmer's pride and ask questions, something funny happens: people will give you answers. It's amazing really. The sangha will support you. If you can't make a PM meeting, then start reading and participating in comp.lang.misc.perl or perlmonks.org. Many times you will find that sangha members will give you an answer in just a couple of hours.

Taking refuge in the buddha, dharma and sangha: it's not just for buddhists anymore.

Heidi

[Keitarou]

That was what I wanted to ask, actually. I was wondering if I could have a date with your daughter, Heidi.
Thanks.

Re:Heidi

[Anonymous Coward]

"Can I give your daughter a perl necklace?"

Re:Heidi

[Imperial Tacohead]

I'd say that she just looks sort of skanky in that picture, which is not quite the same as being adult.

Lord, what if LW reads these posts? I'm gonna play it safe and be anonymous here...

Re:Heidi

[Subcarrier]

Lol, I guess that whole anonymous thing kinda went out the window...

Yes, I can just picture it. LW is probably already on the horn, loudly demanding the cops to get off their fat asses and go put The Imperial Tacohead behind bars right this minute.

Err. Click.

Re:Heidi

[brad3378]

I believe this is the funniest Slashdot comment I have ever read.

MOD THIS GUY UP!

Thanks Larry

[wdr1]

Hi Larry,

Like many others, I *love* Perl. I use it both professionally and personally. You've not only helped make my career, but also given me a very pleasent past-time. I was wondering what I can do to say thank-you? Can we give you money? Dontate something to someone, etc.?

When the new Programming Perl came out, I didn't really need anymoe (viva perldoc!), but wanted to make sure I was putting a few bucks in the pockets of those who made Perl great. What else can I do to say thanks?

-Bill

Re:Thanks Larry

[Second_Derivative]

Uhm, the Perl Foundation seems to be in need of some donations...

Re:Thanks Larry

[twoshortplanks]

Yes! Well...almost yes...you can give The Perl Foundation (a US not-for-profit) money and they'll use it to give Larry, Damian and Dan grants.

Or, if you're in London tomorrow, you can pop along to Conway hall and see Damian speak, and give him a donation then and there.

perl 6 niche

[maraist]

perl 1-5 have been great UNIX configuration/management languages. This includes small-scale webserver platforms. It's very difficult to find any other language that is as versitile in this respect where it reigns in it's niche. It is the perfect combination of speed, power, simplicity and huffman encoding (especially given the co-UNIX-tools look-and-feel).

Perl 6 on the other hand, changes this formula around; favoring a more general solution that potentially reduces performance (due to abstractions), and deviates substantially from the UNIX-family-syntax - Namely: c-ish-syntax ( colon, question mark, select, exception-handling, etc), awk/sedish reg-ex's, raw c-libray-wrappers, etc. It was these very similarities that made learning and accepting perl so trivial since learning CIS and UNIX administration was sufficient to master perl in 2 days.

My question is: does perl 6 have a niche in mind? Or is it spreading itself too thinly; competing more and more against Java/python/C# and thus losing it's identifiable niche?

Re:perl 6 niche

[maraist]

Well, I think the key concern is that perl6 is being completely re-imagined. Instead of being a data-structure navigator, it's a byte-code interpretor. More importantly, the byte-codes are elementary operations instead of macro-operations which would otherwise be optimized. This is an example of a niche change.. Instead of doing it as efficiently or as cleanly as possible, they're going to be competing directly with python / java / C# byte-code-interpretors. And they'll fail for java because of binding differences inherent efficiencies.

I've seen the perl5 internals, and yes it can be messy. I _can_ see the desire to move away from macro's to functions; especially since a good compiler should be able to optimize this away. But perl6 is going to have several layers of indirection.

Further, I can understand the desire to move from ref-counted memory management to a copying-collector; it prevents having to free-the-mallocs. But you could have a hybrid ref-count-when-you-want, mark-sweep-when-you're-lazy. Perl's ref-counting manages strings much better than java's garbage collector; mostly because temporary allocations are immediately reclaimed in perl5, where-as they're just as wasteful as intermediately-lived object allocations in java.

On the one hand, Larry has decided to do a rewrite and avoid all the pitfalls associated with perl5.. But I'm not convinced that this total rewrite isn't going to have even more problems than when it began.. More importantly, it'll be in the same class as every other VM out there and thus not be able to distinguish itself.. And thus lose it's niche.

I'm more satisfied with the idea of a perl6 -> java-byte-code compiler similar to jython, since then you get to have the best of both worlds. A widely supported VM with all the huffman encoding of a perl language.

Still, I support the perl6 move; trying to help it be as good as it can given it's new inherent limitations.

Favourite Quote?

[Vengie]

What is your favourite quote? (*coughsigcough*)

Perl as culture

[jom42]

More than any other programming language, Perl has an extensive culture built up around itself. It is a language that people get quite passionate about, and it's used daily by system adminstrators, application programmers, researchers, hackers, and even poets. When you set out to develop Perl, did you envision this culture blossoming out of it? What is it about Perl that inspires such passion?

How to get people to take Perl seriously

[kin_korn_karn]

I'm a perl programmer who uses it daily. The push is on from the C?O types to get rid of Perl, even though a bunch of us here know it and are very proficient and fast with it. The new standard is Java with web services and all that other BS. This sickens me, because a) I'm biased towards Perl and b) I know Java is simply a fad language and the overhead/infrastructure only serves to give do-nothing architect types jobs.

The high-level technical people in my company don't take Perl seriously. They see it as some kind of super-Awk or an artifact of the early days of the web. Smart people know better, but we're not in charge.

What do you think it would take to get people to take Perl seriously as a programming language [again]? Is widespread use of Perl a goal of yours, or do you not care?

Re:How to get people to take Perl seriously

[Trepidity]

b) I know Java is simply a fad language and the overhead/infrastructure only serves to give do-nothing architect types jobs

Let me guess, you don't know any Java and have never programmed in it?

I personally don't use Java much, but I at least know enough not to make stupid statements like that one...

Re:How to get people to take Perl seriously

[kin_korn_karn]

I know Java. I've programmed in Java. I hate Java. Java takes forever to program in, which makes it good for one thing - increasing man-hours. Certain types of people like this, such as consultants that wants to bill more, and slacking corporate employees that want to pad their estimates and be lazy as hell.

Besides, at least I admitted I was biased in point a).

Linguistics and Perl

[elgonzzo]

I hear your interest in linguistics has had an influence on Perl and Perl's "there's more then one way to do it" attitude mirror's well the flexibility of the languages of the world, better then most programming languages(for better or for worse). I was wondering if you could tell us a little how Perl has been influenced by linguistics and how you wish/hope it will be?

Your perfect computer language ..

[hemabe]

Hello Larry, if you would develop a complete new language, not with perl6 in mind, how would it look like? What would be the design goals? Would it be total object oriented? Thank, Hermi

PLEASE ANSWER

[swagr]

I'd find it hard to beleive that someone could argue that Perl as a language has a better design than Ruby (now's your chance if you want to). If Larry Wall is any sort of visionary shouldn't he swallow his pride and switch to Ruby?

NOTE TO [STUPID] MODERATORS: This is not a troll. This is serious. Think about it.

Re:PLEASE ANSWER

[NerdSlayer]

I'd find it hard to beleive that someone could argue that Perl as a language has a better design than Ruby (now's your chance if you want to). If Larry Wall is any sort of visionary shouldn't he swallow his pride and switch to Ruby?

I find it hard to believe that someone could argue Gnome as a desktop has a better design than Windows. If swagr is any sort of visionary shouldn't he stop doing his own thing and immediately start blowing Bill Gates?

Re:PLEASE ANSWER

[NerdSlayer]

Now my point was that if "his own thing" wasn't as good as someone else's, doesn't he owe it to us to say "hey guys, forget Perl. Yake a look at Ruby". If the answer was "yes" or "no", I didn't really care. I just wanted to know why.

Nope, even after that I think you're still an idiot. According to your twisted logic, we could say:

Everyone knows ford's cars aren't as good as BMW. Ford should start a new ad campaign that says "Why don't ya'll just go buy BMW's, they're better"?

Fucking of course not. Larry can't make perl better? He has to just give up? Why let people have choices, right?

I agree

[Treeluvinhippy]

Microsoft ads on /.? I think i'm going to finish loading all the MRE's into my basement and ride out the oncoming cataclysm.

Examples of doing inheritance and polymorphism

[twoshortplanks]

INHERITENCE
===========

package Foo;
use strict;
use warnings;

sub new
{
my $class = shift;
my $this = bless {}, $class;
}

sub foo { "foo from foo\n" }
sub bar { "bar from foo\n" }

package Foo::Bar;
use base qw(Foo);
use strict;
use warnings;

sub bar { "bar from bar\n" }

-- later in a script

#!/usr/bin/perl

use strict;
use warnings;

use Foo::Bar;

# call inherited methods from Foo
my $foobar = Foo::Bar->new();
print $foobar->foo;

# call overloaded method from Foo::Bar
print $foobar->bar

-- prints

foo from foo
bar from bar

POLYMORPHISM
============

This is hard to describe...everything is polymorphic

my $foo = IO::File->new("bob",">")
or die "Problem with file: $!"

# treat $foo as a IO::Handle, and print to it
print $foo "hello";

Sorry, this is needed to defeat slash.

• Please try to keep posts on topic.
• Try to reply to other people comments instead of starting new threads.
• Read other people's messages before posting your own to avoid simply duplicating what has already been said.
• Use a clear subject that describes what your message is about.
• Offtopic, Inflammatory, Inappropriate, Illegal, or Offensive comments might be moderated. (You can read everything, even moderated posts, by adjusting your threshold on the User Preferences Page)

Ask his opinion on OOP, not language details

[Tablizer]

Polymorphism is the key to OOP. Its what makes everything reusable, and melds everything together in a program.

Most OO fans will say something like "X is the key to OOP". Yet X is always different. X has been "composition", "patterns", "inheritance", "abstraction", "reuse", "encapsulation", "modeling noun interaction", etc. etc. etc.

I would like to ask Larry what he *feels* about OOP rather than what Perl does with it. If you want to know what OOP features Perl has, then RTFM.

Please, don't waste questions on stuff that you can find by RTFM.

(oop.ismad.com)

Re:My Question

[mccrew]

>Compare that to Java where even if you just want to print "Hello World" you have to understand inheritance, polymorphism and static class methods.

Ahhhh, Grasshopper, if only that were true.

I have seen firsthand so-called "professional programmers" using Java to create some of the worst God-awful spagetti code I have seen in my 15+ years of . No matter what the virtues and ideaology behind any language, someone can come along and screw it up beyond recognition.

Power tools in the hands of amateurs regularly results in the loss of limbs.

-Steve

Perl and Ruby

[King Babar]

In the beginning, I programmed in awk. I lived life one line at a time, but it was good. Then somebody turned me onto perl, and life was much more than good.

At that time, there was no credible competition to Perl in any of the niches it basically created. These days, there is more competition than I can comfortably list. Indeed, if I were choosing a language like Perl today, I would be very, very tempted to choose Ruby instead, and I am not the only Perl programmer who feels this way. Interestingly, Perl6 is beginning to look and feel a lot more like Ruby. Are there indeed aspects of Ruby that you were deliberately trying to have in Perl6? Are there any aspects of Ruby you are especially wary of?

Multi-Line Comments

[Washizu]

Could you please put in multi-line commenting in the next version of Perl? My # key is getting rubbed off.

Best language?

[notany]

Larry. What is the best programming language you did not desing?

He'd screw it up

[Wee]

If he could go back, he'd make Perl incomprehensibly arcane and overly complicated, instead of creating an easy-to-learn, general purpose glue/scripting language (which looked a lot like languages that we already knew, but were more powerful than them). The "revisionist history" version of Perl would probably look a look a lot like Perl 6, with even more desire for Perl to be something it's not and be the answer to everyone's problems.

I don't know why Perl wants to be a kitchen-sink language designed to fill any programming role. It is ignoring Perl's strengths to try to do and be everything to everyone. What struck me about the parent post was that just last night I was trying to decide whether Perl would have taken off like it did if it had looked like what Perl 6 will look like. I don't think it would have.

Perl is The Clampetts of programming languages.

-B

Re:He'd screw it up

[Wee]

Sure glad we don't have to worry about you designing a language for sysadmins around the world to use. I'll bet you've got some second-guessing for Linus too.

I'd think part of having an open source implementation of something invites a certain amount of commentary and/or criticism. You don't seem to share that philosophy.

It's my opinion that Perl is getting away from its roots. I think it's becoming bloated and overly complex. If the price of admission for learning Perl by new sysadmins becomes too high, then what? Do you think Perl 6 will be harder or easier than Perl 4 for a neophyte to learn? I'm saying that if Wall could do it all over again, Perl wouldn't be as popular as it is now, for certain reasons. Those reasons boil down to failing to K.I.S.S., as with Perl 6. But like you say, it's his language and he can do what he wants with it.

BTW, I have no "second-guessing" for Linus. I may very well have an opinion about some work he produces, and until he decides to keep the kernel all to himself and not show it to anyone, I might very well state that opinion. Making it available for public use implies making it open to public scrutiny. And if you don't like that then you might try getting therapy or something.

Why is it that, in the OSS community, some of the loudest bitching about those who do comes from those who can't or won't?

Nice. So you're saying that unless one cares to re-invent the wheel one can't state an opinion about locomotion? Unless I make a new kind of watch I can't talk about time? Unless I haul off and make another Ruby or Python I should keep my opinion about Perl to myself? Any sort of naysaying is "bitching"? Bullshit. I'm wondering what happened to you that you should be so negative.

BTW, not that you care or anything, I'm a huge fan of both Larry (whom I've met on several occasions and had interesting conversations with) and of Perl. I'm lucky that I've had the occasion to personally thank him for creating Perl and unknowingly giving me all that he has through his creation. I use Perl nearly every day and I'm hoping that a couple years from now people will discover it to be easy and fun, like I did. I don't believe that they will, however, because of an unnecessarily steep learning curve. But that's just me bitching, right?

Healthy debate... gotta love it. Or maybe not.

-B

Re:He'd screw it up

[ealar dlanvuli]

I'm stealing your sig, kthxbye~

Re:He'd screw it up

[Wee]

IF likesig = "YES" THEN GOTO 10 ELSE GOTO 20

10 PRINT "It ain't really mine to give, but you can have it nonetheless..."
END

20 PRINT "Find alternate here: http://quotes.prolix.nu/Technology/Computers/"
END

-B

other interview

[rsd]

This interview should help to enhance the questions.

Perl and Slashdot?

[toupsie]

Larry,

Do you know of any Perl modules that might assist Slashdot editor's from posting duplicate articles over and over again -- even within a six hour time period?

Re:My Question

[yankeezulu]

there are others who would say the same about java...take a look at what Paul Graham (lisp master)
has to say about java in item 2: Java's Cover, by P. Graham

Re:Why does perl suck so badly?

[Marc2k]

*Cough* underrated? Perl can be written simply so that a C programmers(or yes, even Fortran programmers here where I work) can understand what's going on. Not many other langauges have that sort of versatility. Also, if you would *RAFM*, you could quickly pick up its idiosyncracies and write things a lot quicker than in most other languages. And difficult to install? That's funny...it's standard on just about every UNIX distribution, has a Mac port, and has a company (that successfully makes money) that backs it, selling tools and offering free-for-enterprise-solutions interpreters for Windows. Install? I just double-clicked and hit enter a few times.

Re:My Question

[Fastball]

I agree that you can distinguish a good Perl hack from a not so good Perl hack, but I don't think it's limited to newbies. I've seen folks who've used Perl for 3+ years continue to write unreadable page noise. They get by on experience, but the next guy who has to maintain their code would do best to sack the current code and start from scratch.

How's the eye surgery turning out?

[Lumpish Scholar]

You had a cornea transplant a few years ago (Google cache). How's it doing?

The coming "Age of Virtual Machines"

[Paul Bain]

Traditionally, computer programming languages have competed against one another, but now we seem to be moving towards a world in which a programmer will be able to choose from a set of virtual machines (VM's) as well as from a set of programming languages. The Perl 6 VM (dubbed "Parrot?") can execute Java source-code (because Java source can be compiled into Perl 6 bytecode) as well as Perl source-code, and, indeed, almost any programming language can be compiled into Perl 6 bytecode. The same is roughly true of Java. Because the source-code of nearly any programming language can be compiled into Java bytecode, a JVM can execute code written in nearly any programming language provided that a compiler has been written to transform the source code into Java bytecode. Examples of such compilers include Jython (which compiles Python source-code into Java bytecode), NetRexx (which compiles Rexx into Java bytecode), and JRuby. And, of course, there is Microsoft's .Net, which, IIRC, also contemplates (or at least permits?) the compilation of nearly any source-code into a bytecode specified by MS (of course, MS wants the bytecode's execution to take place on a MS O/S exclusively). Furthermore, there's no reason (that I can think of) that would prevent, say, Java or Perl from being compiled into Python bytecode and executed by a Python VM.

There are many implications and consequences of giving software developers this degree of choice. In your opinion, what are the most significant of these consequences?

Re:Perl as a "scripting" or a "programming" langua

[Tablizer]

(* What exactly is the difference between "scripting" and "programming". *)

I like to make this distinction:

1. Static typed language (ST)

2. Dynamic typed language (DT)

3. Scripting languague (SL)

ST languages check all typing at compile time, and are thus usually compiled.

DT checks typing only during run time, or has no built-in types (everything is a string or just bytes to the interpreter and numeric operations convert/check them on the fly. Thus there is a sub-distinction between those DT langs which carry internal "type" codes for variables, and those that don't). However, DT languages may target large projects and have a lot of features, and thus a longer learning curve.

SL are meant to be easy to learn and usually a "glue" language. They keep features to a minimum in order to make learning them easy (except they do tend to have a lot of string operations to help in gluing). Unlike DT, they are not meant as a "career language". The language author assumes that the programmer will be using many languages, and will not assume that their SL language will be the primary language for your shop, thus it does *not* have to carry the burden of being everything to everybody.

Perl is a DT language, but not an SL anymore.

feature reduction

[g4dget]

Perl seems to have been accreting features at a very fast pace since Perl4, and Perl6 doesn't seem to slow that down. Is there ever going to be a significant reduction in features? Perl at this point looks so huge and daunting that I really can't recommend it to newcomers as a scripting language anymore.

Easy...

[DAldredge]

A scripting language is one that you don't like.

A programming language is one that you do like.

Re:Easy...

[kasparov]

The poster asked why someone with a technical/scientific mind would believe in a god. Faith is not a particularly "scientific" reason to belive something. Now, the only answer that Larry may be able to give could very well be "Faith," but hopefully he would be able to give some other information which would show a well reasoned, thoughtful opinion--as opposed to mere blind faith.

Perl 6 naming

[kawika]

Did you consider using a name other than Perl 6 for your new language? Many current Perl users recoil at the extreme changes made to their favorite language, even though they can still write Perl 5 for the most part. (And I really like the new regexp design.)

In retrospect do you think a new name or version nomenclature would have warmed the reception and/or reduced confusion?

faster loading times

[rsd]

One of the features I really miss in perl is a clean way to pre-compile
scripts. Both to speedup loading times and to byte-[en]code to program.

There is perlcc, which really isn't supported as a production tool and doesn't take
modules into account.

What do you think about technologies like Zend?

Is this really a issue for perl? or just a matter of time?

any relation?

[Lxy]

Larry-

My name is Brian Wall and I live in Minnesota. Any chance we're related? :-)

Re:My Question

[asv108]

public class helloWorld
{
public static void main(String[] args)
{
System.out.println("Hello Word");
}
}

Doesn't look like you need to know much about inheritance, polymorphism, and static class methods to me.

Important Question

[Frank of Earth]

I have a dire question and I hope that /. 50 cha$

Thank you Larry,
I won't jump off this building until I hear your answer

CM process preference when developing in a group

[cpfeifer]

lock, change, test, commit, unlock

or

change, test, commit, merge?

Are you a locker or a merger?

Re:My Question

[Pulzar]

"Doesn't look like you need to know much about inheritance, polymorphism, and static class methods to me." -- says the man as he defines a static class method.

Do you USE Perl?

[Lxy]

I was just looking at www.wall.org and the site for your church, of which you are the webmaster. Neither of these sites use any perl whatsoever. Coming from you, I would have expected to see a super cool Perl based calendar and lots of other neat dynamic stuff. What's your reasoning for using no perl on either of these sites?

Christianity

[Colonel Panic]

Larry,

As a fellow Christian (I'm sure that revelation won't get me mod points) I must say that I have really appreciated your 'State of the Onion' speeches over the years. Thanks for showing that Christians can think and that we don't all mindlessly follow a 'televangelist' religion.

Now for the question:
Why do you think that the geek/tech community is so anti-Christian and what can we do to help change their negative stereotypes of Christians? Why is it that so many in this community feel that being a 'Thinking Christian' is an oxymoron? People like Knuth and yourself show that Christians can think and make contributions in the technical world.

I tend to believe that the anti-Christian bias has some justification - meaning that Christians have often not displayed the grace which the Founder displayed and taught us to live in. What is it that Ghandi said when asked about Christianity? "Christianity I like, but it's those Christians that I'm not sure about". I also suspect that the anti-intellectualism of the pop-televangelists that is unfortunately so visible bears much of the blame (often when I come across one of those so-called Christian TV shows I think I'm looking at some kind of religious mutation and when I realize that these folks claim to believe the same things I do, I wince).

Re:Christianity

[Elwood P Dowd]

It's not so much that geeks/techs are anti-Christian, but really that... um... intellectuals tend to be anti-Christian. Probably in similar proportions.

I couldn't tell you why other people are anti-Christian, but I can tell you why I am: Christianity is unfalsifiable. I can't imagine how such a hypothesis could be shown to improve anyone's understanding of the world around them. This leads me to suspect that every Christian has certain things to which he or she refuses to apply critical thought. I can't see how that does anyone any good.

Of course, many people apply all kinds of critical thought to religion... but until they make a falsifiable prediction, I feel like they've done it wrong. I guess that's where my point falls apart. Eh, it's only karma.

Re:What about Ruby and PHP?

[Christianfreak]

Geez, "my language is better than your language" trolls are bad enough in normal Perl articles but this is going to get read by the creator of Perl itself.

As for Ruby Jobs, I've been recently unemployed looking for a new job, in all my searches I've found Ruby mentioned maybe once. The biggies? C, Java, Perl. There aren't even all that many people looking for PHP.

Easy...

[DAldredge]

It is called Faith.

Re:I wonder what Larry Wall thinks of this.

[ceejayoz]

They've been running for months, and invariably someone comments on it in EVERY article.

Enough already, we know MS advertises on OSDN, no need to tell us for the 209348098th time.

Re:My Question

[tshoppa]

So in otherwords, you are a really good perl coder when you are the only one that can read your code

No, that's not what I said. I said that qualities of good code include using "idomatic Perl" (i.e. not writing C in Perl) and making use of Perl's strengths (like hashes). Do these and you'll be a good ways towards writing readable code.

Garbage collection

[Clipper]

As others have pointed out, Perl's garbage collector does lend itself to the circle of garbage problem because it uses reference counting. Could you comment on the tradeoffs weighed when designing the garbage collector? e.g., Efficiency, time to implement, etc. If you could, would you reimplement it so that it used techniques like the Train Algorithm instead?

Re:Important one...

[Jon Abbott]

Are you Weird Al Yankovic? Or one of his relatives ?

I'm serious, you look a lot like him to me... ! :-)

I second this question... To quote Leonard Richardson, Larry Wall has many of the mannerisms of Weird Al Yankovic, and he also had the Weird Al glasses and Hawaiian shirt (and old-school mustache).

Even perl.org mentions this possibility (with pictures)!

Re:Perl as a "scripting" or a "programming" langua

[joto]

According to the camel book, a script is something you give to an actor, while a program is something you give to an audience, so I guess Larry has already answered this one.

By the way. Your definition of dynamically typed languages are far off. If they don't carry typecodes to check types at runtime, then they are not dynamically typed.

If e.g. everything is a string (tcl used to be that way, not too sure anymore), or a machine word (e.g. forth), then it is an untyped language. And there is a large difference between untyped and dynamically typed.

Also, it would be more correct to say that statically typed languages check most types at compile time. An obvious counterexample to "all types" would be an object-oriented language (otherwise dynamic dispatch wouldn't work). Or C, because it allows you to fake anything with casts and unions.

As for what constitutes a scripting language, I think that will be debated for ever, simply because it's not possible to define. Personally, I like Larry's answer in the Camel book.

New Life Church

[Engdy]

Larry,

What's it like for a celebrity to be a part of a community of Christians? Do you pass the collection plate and hand out programs before service starts like any other member, or do you get the celebrity treatment there, as well? I guess I'm asking how deep and intrusive into your life this celebrity stuff goes.

Keep it up, I appreciate it, and the world needs more Christian heros!

Improving Perl's documentation

[Anonymous Coward]

Having high quality documentation seems crucial for a programming language's acceptance in many environments. While the content of Perl's documentation is great, its structure, organisation and general layout could be vastly improved.

The basic POD format used for Perl's documentation is too simplistic, providing no support for tables.

It is not possible to obtain high quality print documentation either--sure, a man page can be converted to PostScript, but the result still doesn't look very professional. This node on PerlMonks also discusses these issues for anyone who is interested.

So, do you consider Perl's documentation to be a limitation to its more widespread acceptance? Could you use your considerable influence in the Perl world to start a new drive towards improving documentation?

Re:My Question

[Anonymous DWord]

"Hello Word?" Are you stealing that bastard paperclip's code again?

Re:My Question

[ajs]

Perl is so easy to learn and alows a lot of "Baby Talk"

Perl is easy to learn, and yes it allows "baby talk" in the same way that C++, Java, smalltalk or any other complex language does. Those who are just learning will use only a small subset of the language. This is always true.

it makes a good programmer indistinguishable from a amateur wannabe

I can certainly tell the difference, and I do so in phone screens and interviews for my company.

Someone just coming to the language can write code, yes. But they won't be able to write high-quality programs that take advantage of the language. This is true everywhere. Read "Effective C++" for a really good sense of what it is that C++ programmers won't know from day one, even if they've memorized the BNF for the language.

Serious question

[Futurepower(R)]

Note to moderators: This is a serious question. You may disagree with what is said, but your disagreement does not make this question one that should be ignored. Please don't think that Larry Wall is fragile and needs to be shielded from confrontive questions. Note also that this question needs to be phrased in several ways to make its breadth fully clear.

Larry, now that you have seen what Perl has become after all the excellent work and all the years of effort, was Perl a good idea? Did we need another language? Would it have been better to have added features to an existing language, and to have made a more capable C++ interpreter, an advanced CInt, for example?

Now that Perl is a mature, full-featured language, do you think it is a properly designed language? When you first worked on Perl, did you imagine what it would eventually become? It was an easy language to learn then, and that was one of its advantages. Has Perl, now that it is mature, become just another language, with the exception that it is an interpreter? Are there any features of Perl that could not be added to C or C++? Are there features of Perl that were designed to make it easy, like implicit variables, that are not a good idea for a mature language? What are the features of Perl that make it a necessary addition to the numerous languages?

403

[Anonymous Coward]

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

Changes Based on Demand?

[Spud Zeppelin]

It's no secret that Perl 6 is being designed/developed as a radically different (to the point of mutual unintelligibility) language than Perl 4 was a decade ago (and even Perl 5 is today). On top of that, in today's development there are a lot more people a lot more involved in the design (eg. Conway, Sugalski) than there have been historically. So, all that said, has demand from the community caused changes in Perl as a language that you would not have envisioned otherwise or that take it in directions you would rather not have gone in personally?

Re:My Question

[CoughDropAddict]

"Doesn't look like you need to know much about inheritance, polymorphism, and static class methods to me." -- says the man as he defines a static class method.

Irrelevant. Just because a person copies "public static void main" out of example 1.1 in Learn Java in 24 hours doesn't mean they understand what it means. I would wager that 90% of Perl programmers who use "my" regularly don't have a clue about lexical vs. dynamic scoping, but it doesn't matter because "my" does what they expect.

Answer: Yes Missionaries use it.

[Raindeer]

I know of some bible translators in a country I won't mention, where Perl is used to provide an automatic PGP-encryption of the plaintext emails into cyphered emails and vice versa, before anything is e-mailed out to the rest of the world or when received, before it is dropped in the mailboxes. For want of a real ISP the machine dialed out to a base of the same organisation elsewhere in the world where the same setup exists and from there the mails get send on in plaintext. All this is done to make sure that when communication is monitored no Christian texts are discovered.

Now you might say that that is not secure, everything is still in plaintext on the server of the missionaries and you're right. (not to mention the bibles in their houses, the work stored on the computer etc.) The reasoning behind this is, that the censor/secret police in this country have a policy what they don't explicitely know about, they won't bother with. They can't read the e-mail, so they don't know about it, so they don't need to take action.

All of this was hacked together by a bible translator (a linguist) on an of the shelve Redhat old.ancient linux machine. The man-pages provided enough information for him to finally get it all working.

Aikido and Perl

[ScottMaxwell]

First, many thanks for Perl, which has saved me much anguish.

I know you're an aikidoka, and after studying aikido for a year, I've come to see several similarities between aikido and Perl. For example, Perl gives you a nice feeling of blending with the problem instead of struggling directly against it, just as you blend with and redirect your attacker's energy rather than directly confronting it in aikido. Similarly, TMTOWTDI ("there's more than one way to do it") in aikido as well as in Perl (at least in my dojo, where understanding and reaching the goal is more important than slavishly copying the sensei).

My question is, did you consciously approach Perl with aikido in mind (or vice versa :-)? Or is it just that they both appeal to your personality in the same way?

Also, incidentally, what style of aikido do you practice?

Re:What is the airspped velocity....

[smittyoneeach]

The interview is with Larry, not Guido, Fido.

most obfuscated..

[schmiddy]

what are the most obfuscated few lines of Perl you've ever seen~?

How to become a Perl Guru

[Flounder]

I've had minimal experience with programming in the past. A friend turned me onto Perl and gave me the Llama book. I'm about half way through it now, and I'm loving every minute of it.

My question is, where do I go from here? I'm wanting to learn everything there is to learn, and do everything that can be done with Perl. I'm not expecting to get to your level of knowledge, but I'd sure like to try.

I've already purchased the Camel book and that's where I'll go after the Llama book. What would you recommend after that? Perl Cookbook? Advanced Perl? Memorize all the PerlDocs?

Re:How to become a Perl Guru

[scrytch]

I've already purchased the Camel book and that's where I'll go after the Llama book. What would you recommend after that? Perl Cookbook? Advanced Perl? Memorize all the PerlDocs?

program something. grab CPAN modules that look interesting to you. go through their source. understand how they work, thoroughly.

Re:My Question

[Tony-A]

No, you are a really good perl coder when you can write a program that expeditiously solves the problem and a non-programmer can read and comprehend what the program does. (How it does it is a different matter altogether;)

ReGex Memories

[smittyoneeach]

My observation is that the quality of the tools bound the quality of the solution: people don't build a Cadillac from Legos.
How about an anecdote (or two) about a Red Sea-sized problem parted by a slightly unmiraculous, yet nifty, regular expression.
As has been noted elsewhere, the fact that other languages (JavaScript, VBScript) refer to their RegEx syntax as 'Perl-style' is a hefty compliment. Any disgruntlement about that?
Perl6: how soon?

Your successor

[Get Behind the Mule]

Like Linus Torvalds, you are the alpha programmer, the founder and "benevolent dictator" of a major open source project. Of course, both projects now have large and well-structured teams of developers with many recognized leaders, but nevertheless, everyone looks to both you and Linus for guidance and leadership, and everyone accepts that you have the final say in issues of dispute.

The open source movement hasn't been around long enough for us to witness the transition to a new top dog in a worldwide, highly visible project, so we all have to wonder sometimes what will happen when you and Linus decide to pass the baton, and how it will be handled. Have you decided what has to happen for you to retire from the Perl project? Or do you think you'll be hanging in there at 75 and above, a John Lee Hooker of programming languages, until the day you flop over your keyboard? Do you think that you'll hand over the scepter to a successor at the pinnacle, or do you think Perl can be taken over by some kind of committee? Doesn't there have to be an individual who has final say on important and possibly controversial decisions? Do you think the developer community will accept a new leader on your sayso, or will there have to be some sort of election? And if you do consider choosing a successor, what will your criteria be?

BTW, I'm an atheist, but I hope you don't mind my saying God bless you for creating Perl. :-)

Parrot as a good VM?

[IamTheRealMike]

I was talking to Miguel de Icaza a few days ago about VMs on IRC. As you may be aware, he runs the Mono project which is creating an implementation of .NET

He claimed the design of Parrot was fundamentally flawed and pointed to it's highly unusual design and the very high number of opcodes. I was wondering exactly what you're thoughts are on Parrot. It's claimed that it'll be a good target for any language, both static and dynamic, but are you really interested in pushing this? Could you see Parrot as worthy competition to .NET in the cross-language VM space? Is having a very large number of opcodes an advantage or a disadvantage?

Re:Perl as a "scripting" or a "programming" langua

[Tablizer]

(* By the way. Your definition of dynamically typed languages are far off. If they don't carry typecodes to check types at runtime, then they are not dynamically typed. *)

Whose's classification system are you using?

(* Also, it would be more correct to say that statically typed languages check most types at compile time. *)

So "staticly typed" (and "dynamicaly typed") are a *continuum* in your opinion? I guess I can agree on that.

(* Personally, I like Larry's answer in the Camel book. *)

Yes, but it ignores a commonly-used term/concept whether he likes it or not. Even he does not have enough power to change most tech lingo.

if you want to do CGI

[Trepidity]

You should be using PHP anyway, not C++. =P

ohmygod

[tswinzig]

Is this really a issue for perl? or just a matter of time?

If this isn't a perfect setup for a Larry Wall-ism, then I don't know what is!

ease of installation for Perl apps

[bcrowell]

This opens up the whole issue of application programming in Perl, which is something I do a lot of. Personally I've been pretty happy with Perl/Tk as a GUI toolkit, although I'm looking forward to seeing it on MacOS X.

But a bigger issue for me as a Perl app writer has been ease of installation. Is this going to get better in Perl 6? Installing a Perl app can be a fairly complex process, especially if you need lots of CPAN modules, and a lot of them call C code that needs to be compiled. Also, there seems to be a general assumption that modules are going to be installed in /usr, but many end-users might not have the privs to do that. None of this is a big deal in the world of sysadmins and webmasters, but for naive end-users it's a problem. Will the advent of Parrot make it possible to give the user a big ol' bytecode file that includes everything? I know it's going to become easier to glue C and Perl together -- will this translate into an easier exeprience for the end-user as well?

I guess I'm just spoiled by the MacOS X experience, where an application appears as an icon in the Finder, and to intstall it, all you do is drag it to the Applications folder. Wow! Java also does a good job of streamlining the installation process, although it's at the cost of making the standard library ridiculously huge.

Re:My Question

[Bingo Foo]

• C is Latin
  
• FORTRAN is German
  
• C++ is English
  
• Java is Esperanto
  
• Perl is 13375p34k
  

not faith, but simple logic.

[jcsehak]

Whatever gave me conciousness, that's God.

Ah the 80's...

[Andy Smith]

How sweet, she's wearing a calculator watch!

Home Automation

[Scott8586]

Larry, we understand you are a home automation enthusiast, can you tell us something more about your setup? Powerline/Wired/Wireless? Cameras? Sensors? A "smart" home? Just Curious. Thanks.

Re:I am not Larry, but easy answers

[King Babar]

The use of * for array flattening in Perl 6 is stolen straight from Ruby.

Well,yeah. I was also thinking of the move to "dot" syntax for "methods" (lots of languages do this, but Ruby was the closest in other ways), some aspects of the new "module" keyword (disclaimer: I have not gone over the exegesis on this as carefully as I might have), and other things that don't come to mind at this instant since I'm making sure Milo doesn't tear down the house while I type this...

Ruby's lack of strict.pm, and the optional semi-colons are both big drawbacks.

I don't consider the semi-colons optional. :-) I haven't misses strict.pm yet; dunno what that says about me. A big plus for me with ruby over python is actual delimiters for "block-like" things. I like the Perl6 notion that {} always creates a lexical closure, except that it has forced other syntax for things you would think are in braces...until you remember the closure bit.

A philosophical difference: Perl retains its "syntax and operators indicates typing, with autoconversions where needed" philosophy where Ruby is quite intentionally opposite with its "uniformity of operaters and syntax with different datatypes defining each operator as makes sense to it.

Well, I personally now consider a lot of the automagical conversions of Perl to be a failed experiment. What looks nice in a short script here really, truly falls down in the large. The dorkiest thing about Ruby, though, is the "everything including an integer is an object" notion. Integers are values; they do not have state.

Thanks for the feed-back, non-Larry. :-)

but you contradict yourself

[Ender Ryan]

"Perhaps mod_perl might do the same for me"

Ok, let me follow your logic here. You say Perl CGI is less easy/intuitive to use than PHP, which is usually used as an Apache module. You then say that mod_perl might do the same for you, which is correct BTW, but then you go on to say that PHP "is a lot easier to use in that particular niche"...

So, you are comparing PHP to mod_perl, which you admittedly have not learned anything about, and then conclude that PHP is easier?

I'll be blunt, you're a fool.

Re:My Question

[Pulzar]

Irrelevant. Just because a person copies "public static void main" out of example 1.1 in Learn Java in 24 hours doesn't mean they understand what it means.

By that logic, you don't need to know how to program at all, you can just copy full programs from open source projects.

The underlying argument is that Java requires more "advanced" programming structures to do simple tasks than Perl. Whether beginners understand them or not is irrelevant.

Begging to differ

[nakaduct]

"a firm principle of language design [...] that in all respects equivalent programs should have few possibilities for different representation [...]. Otherwise completely different styles of programming arise unnecessarily, [...]"
-- Edsger W. Dijkstra on Ada (source)

Perl's philosophy is largely a complement of this sentiment. This kind of thinking was in vogue for a long time, and Perl's bucking of the trend was (largely) responsible for its popularity.

Perl advanced the notion that syntax is not a byproduct of grammar. It should not be an orthogonal representation of the language's capabilities. It is important that the concatenation operator be one or two characters. A language is for humans to use; it should reflect how humans think. Give the computer the tedious job of normalizing that input, and spare the human's cycles for more important things.

Read the Apocalypses, or Larry's intro to the ORA books, or the Exegeseses(es?). You'll note artifacts of this philosophy everywhere, including in a discussion of original complaint, anonymous character classes: Unicode makes unnamed character ranges less of a Right Thing than before. And with real set operators for named classes (you can say Word Characters and Whitespace but not Digits), they're a lot less necessary. They're still in there, but it's a couple extra characters to reflect their diminished relevance.

There are some that disagree with this thinking, but I'd question what attracted them to the language in the first place.

Re:Begging to differ

[Ian Bicking]

A language is for humans to use; it should reflect how humans think. Give the computer the tedious job of normalizing that input, and spare the human's cycles for more important things.

I understand, but disagree, with the basic Perl philosophy. I think Perl succeded more because it filled a niche at the right time -- an interpreted language that allowed quick development. Tcl was too limited, the Lisps were too inaccessible.

But this isn't the place to debate Perl philosophy. I do want to note that Dijkstra wasn't talking about the complexity of the compiler. Not just compilers, but also humans have to normalize the input when they are reading the code. Perl is notoriously bad on this count.

What if Perl6 is broken?

[flonker]

Mr Wall,

I've been using Perl for quite a while now. I've fallen in love with it. It's my first choice language, (when I do have a choice).

That said, I'm very nervous about Perl6. What if it ends up suffering from second system effect? What if it just isn't very good? Theory and practice being so different, it's possible for you to be completely wrong about where Perl needs to improve.

In short, what would be your course of action if Perl6 isn't very good in the real world?

Re:not faith, but simple (circular) logic.

[jcsehak]

...which could start to explain the egyptian pantheon :)

To answer your first question, yes; but let's back it up even more. Consciousness is, of course, extremely complex system behavior. But how did that system get started? Even if we evolved from microbes, who created the microbes? Did the universe simply always exist? Science says no, right? Then what came before? If there was a big bang, who started it (frankly, I think the big bang is about the most creationist theory ever to come about)? Whoever did, it's who I call God. I guess it might be kinda like saying "whoever pooped in your litter box, that's your cat." I don't need to see your cat to know it exists.

So I guess I should amend my original statement to "whoever created existence, that's God."

Learn Perl 5 and Perl 6

[PythonOrRuby]

Seriously. Perl 5 will be around for a long, long time, and even after Perl 6 is out for awhile, Perl 5 will likely still be the standard with the more conservative(and mainstream) *nix OSes.

And at the same time, learn Perl 6(start now, at parrotcode.org). While some here will say Perl doesn't really have anything new, I say that isn't necessary. Sometimes it's enough to just do something better than it's ever been done before. :-)

Influence by little known languages.

[Jayson]

I was wondering if you have looked at little known languages for ideas in Perl? It seems that Perl is agressively going after areas that are heavily explorer in other language paradigms. Have you seen or been influenced by any smaller language (aside from the common choices of Scheme, Python, Ruby, Tcl, and the such)?

Seeing Perl6's introduction of more powerful map-like and reduce-like operators in the hypers, I would like to know if you have used and been influenced by the modern APL derivatives: Dr. Iverson's APL successor, J, is more well-known; but Arthur Whitney's K mixes more functional, Lisp-inspired abilities into the language.

Language advocacy

[Per Abrahamsen]

Perl is the scripting language "to beat", so like C++, it is often the target for insulting comments and unfair comparisons by advocates of other languages. Usually from fanboys who can be dismissed, but surprisingly often from intelligent and educated people who ought to know better.

You, however, never seem to enter such discussions, much less answer in anger. How do you manage that? Doesn't it hurt? Or is it your Christian faith that gives you strength?

Re:Perl as a "scripting" or a "programming" langua

[joto]

Whose's classification system are you using? English. If the programming system can't somehow tell you or check the type of something, then it isn't a typed system. Hence untyped. But of course, if you can come up with some dynamically typed system not using any form of typecodes, but instead relying on e.g. magic, I'd be happy to say I was wrong.

How dynamic is OOP in Perl?

[freeBill]

Any time someone tells you OOP has an absolute definition (with pillars, requirements etc.) they're probably lying to you. Object oriented programming has an evolving definition (which is starting to solidify, but could still change). The problem with many languages that implement OOP is that they implement a static view of OOP (as perceived by the language designer at the time of the implementation).

Actually, because Perl's object orientation is "bolted on" it is possible to implement any view of OOP as appropriate to your own current opinions. Or (perhaps more correctly) as appropriate to the problem you are tackling. If encapsulation is all you need, implement encapsulation all by its lonesome. If you need it all, implement it all. If you have some experimental ideas about an expanded definition of OOP, implement them for a single project.

With the caveat that strong typing != OOP, type is another example of Perl's dynamic nature. With object typing, you can implement exactly the parts of strong typing that you need.

Perhaps the right questions is: "How dynamic is OOP in Perl? Can it be expanded to include aspect-oriented programming?

He did. It's called...

[freeBill]

...Perl6.

As a committed user of Ruby, I find this question just plain silly. Perl has an enormous library and an enormous user-base. For many things I still use Perl. When swagr's ported all of CPAN to Ruby, I won't need to anymore.

But some people may still prefer Perl. Grow up.

Christiansen

[The Ape With No Name]

Did you ever want to choke him? Do you consider being a utter boor good advocacy for Perl? If so, Tommy Boy fits the bill.

Re:Perl as a "scripting" or a "programming" langua

[Tablizer]

(* If the programming system can't somehow tell you or check the type of something, then it isn't a typed system. *)

Well, it is sometimes said that the "programmer must manage types", meaning that any "typeness" is up to the programmer to handle properly.

I guess in a strict interpretation, if the language does not recognize the concept of "type", then it could be called "typeless", but in practice the *concept* permiates many design decisions, such as how the API handles doing math on non-numeric values.

BTW, my pet language, L, is pretty much "typeless" in that sense.

Correction

[jesser]

Eek, I left out a "not" and made it sound like IE does more incremental rendering than Mozilla. Corrected text:

One other advantage of using CSS rather than tables is especially applicable to Slashdot: over a slow connection, users of older browsers such as IE 6 for Windows can not see the first comment without waiting for the rest of the comments to load. Mozilla can display comments one at a time despite the table-heavy layout, but last time I checked, it can only do so in Slashdot's light mode.

Re:not faith, but simple (circular) logic.

[jcsehak]

That's my whole point. I don't think God exists, per se. You have the something (matter? or if you like, 1), and the nothing (antimatter? or 0), and the void that came before it, the absence of both something and nothing; and you have God, which is whatever was around when everything was null.

It was my impression that it was widely accepted among scientists that the universe was x years old, and therefore had to spring into existence at some point. But I could be wrong. That the universe simply always existed seems impossible to me. Everything that exists in the world had to be created at some point, out of existing matter: Slashdot, my car, this computer, etc. I can't believe that the universe just exists on it's own anymore than I can believe that no one is responsible for making Slashdot. I define God as the thing that always was, that created the universe, and therefore, is incomprehensible. I can't say that the universe always existed because it itself can be seen, studied and understood. God, being unable to be comprehended, is therefore worthy of worship. I'm not sure if I'm getting my point across or I'm dancing around it. It's a tricky point to make.

Okay, let me try another analogy. I can rip a CD using iTunes and make mp3s from it. But I don't understand the algorithms behind it, I just know which buttons to press. The person who programmed iTunes is at a level of sophistication higher than me, at least in mp3 programming terms. By the same token, we can all go find a woman and make a baby (theoretically; this is Slashdot). But no one knows really how a human is made; no one can put consciousness into lifeless tissue. Except God. Jesus has even done it (or so I believe).

Personally, I belive that to think God is a who is pretty dumb. If I were to try to describe God, I'd say He's a consciousness. Either that, or he is existence. When they say man was created in God's image, I figure that means something more like a disk image, rather than picture. The key point about this image being it's ability to make things for their own sake, not just to use them for something, which is what seperates us from animals (I figure).

Re:My Question

[CoughDropAddict]

Irrelevant. Just because a person copies "public static void main" out of example 1.1 in Learn Java in 24 hours doesn't mean they understand what it means.

By that logic, you don't need to know how to program at all, you can just copy full programs from open source projects

That doesn't follow, at all.

The underlying argument is that Java requires more "advanced" programming structures to do simple tasks than Perl.

That's an inaccurate generalization, that is only supportable by two minor instances:

• there are no functions, only methods (ie. all procedures must belong to a class)
• The entry point of a program happens to be "public static void main" in the class invoked by the interpreter. This is more or less a consequence of the above.

Nothing else else about Java fundamentally requires more "advanced" programming structures than C++ or Perl.

Re:Perl as a "scripting" or a "programming" langua

[joto]

I guess in a strict interpretation, if the language does not recognize the concept of "type", then it could be called "typeless",

Yes, or partially untyped, like C is. As long as two distint types use the same amount of bits in it's representation, C allows you to interpret those bits in any way you like with casts. but in practice the *concept* permiates many design decisions, such as how the API handles doing math on non-numeric values.

I have no idea what you mean here. If you mean things like pointer arithmetic, I agree, because pointer arithmetic can be quite useful, and I guess some languages have an API for that instead of doing it in the base language like C. Things like vectors, matrices and formulae are usually handled in a typed manner.

But yes, there is room for many different typing schemes in the world of languages. And many successfull languages are in between the three main alternatives (which of course can be subdivided further).

I have never heard of L though...

Re:My Question

[Pulzar]

Nothing else else about Java fundamentally requires more "advanced" programming structures than C++ or Perl.

I cannot agree with that. (First, I never mentioned C++, I'm talking about perl vs. java here. C++ is a whole different story.)

To use most of the Java built-in features, you have to understand OO enough to be able to instantiate new objects, call public methods, and handle the exceptions they return. And this is the case if you wrote your hole program as one "public static void main" function. Otherwise, you'd have to know how to define a class, use interfaces, etc.

Basically, it's OO+Exceptions vs. functional interepreted script. I know several Perl programmers who can do wonderful things in Perl, but Java is way out of their league -- you probably know some, as well. Do you know any Java programmers who wouldn't be able to handle a scripting language like Perl?

Functional perl fails in eval()

[korpiq]

I'm developing my own language nowadays, after getting tired of OO Perl (which is excellent).

I'm going along the lines that a name = value is calculated "immediately", whereas a name := value defines the way the value of name is evaluated when it is used, ie. a function. name.subname can be either a value in a hash, a method of an 'object', or a value of a hash returned by a function - who cares? A sentence ending in a dot makes the definition constant. And stuff. I find myself rebuilding a lot of Perl's inner structures. Stupidiosity is all mine.

I tried to do like stuff in Perl, but failed at a simple attempt to load classes dynamically through recursive eval(). Will eval() be recurseable in Perl 6?

Should probably have spat that out better, but I'm late anyway. Bollocks.

E.......

[TheLocustNMI]

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!

Re:faster to type...

[PythonOrRuby]

Hell to debug, though. :-)

And I'm not talking about being able to read it.

Thank goodness for optional strong typing in Perl6, and what looks like some decent contract support.

What's the Next Catchy Descriptor of Perl?

[4of12]

after:

"Swiss Army chainsaw"

and

"duct tape of the Internet"

?

Multilanguage Solutions

[spiro_killglance]

. I think the language architects who aren't living in reality tend to like multi-language solutions a lot more than ordinary folks do.

Do you folks, agree with that because i don't. My last product involved writing a java server, that produced XML that was passed into javascript by a perl script, using a custom minilanguage for the
template.