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State of the Onion 7
chromatic writes "One of the highlights of every OSCON is Larry Wall's annual State of the Onion address, covering Perl, philosophy, linguistics, music, theology, science, and usually a few other things thrown in for good measure. His talk from OSCON 2003, State of the Onion 7, is now online."
heh...polly wanna cracker?
I read this first page, thinking "this is quite amusing". I think got to the bottom, and saw it was 11 pages long. I don't think I've *ever* read something 11 pages long online in my life. The end of page 1 he's on about deconstructionism. I skip randomly to page 7. First paragraph:
"Let's take another look at the pink tennis court. I mean, the universal architectural diagram. It really isn't quite as universal as I've made it out to be. First, let's get rid of the pink."
This is the thoughts of the man behind perl. This explains a *lot* about perl.
Read reviews of shopping cart software
Is Larry a slashdot regular ? :)
Now, some of you young folks are too steeped in postmodernism to know anything about postmodernism, so let's review. Postmodernism in its most vicious form started out with the notion that there exist various cultural constructs, or texts, or memes, that allow some human beings to oppress other human beings. Of course, in Soviet Russia it's the other way around. Which is why they managed to deconstruct themselves, I guess.
Well... it isn't very funny anymore, and they have too many ads. I mean how many times can you read a story like "Local Man Proud of Coffee Cup Collection?"
Slashdotter are stupid and biased.
Anyone else expecting a link to a cover story from The Onion?
Karma: NaN
For those who are wondering, a 'pony' is cockney rhyming slang for crap:
Pony and trap: crap.
Incidentally Ponie is 25GBP (well, a pony, really)... Only Fools & Horses, "stick a pony in me pocket", you English will be with me on that.
But really, now there's this Parrot, that's going to help Perl5 become Ponie, to give birth to Perl6. Madness. (English will be with me again, "One step beyonnnnnd")
Jeez I'm even sounding like Larry. Anybody care for some Objective Orientation towards a real page for what PERL 6 is really supposed to be about?
Conversion Rate Optimisation French / English consultant
Funny, I saw no statements from T. Herman Zweibel regarding the state of The Onion...
There are some people that if they don't know, you can't tell 'em.
mod me down as troll if you wish, but I have one question: why doesn't he aknowledge that Perl has reached its goals long ago and give up development. Seriously, what's the point?
The similiarities are beyond skin-deep
The dangers of knowledge trigger emotional distress in human beings.
'state of the onion' address is here
Boy, was this right on target or what?
Creationists are a lot like zombies. Slow, but powerful and numerous. And they all want to eat our brains.
What, better than making geek jokes? Are you mad? Perl-ease! ;-)
J.
You're only jealous cos the little penguins are talking to me.
What a cheap comment. Who modded this to +5, are we suddenly all Perl haters too ?
I don't know Perl, but I know I like the text and I get his points. It makes me consider studying Perl.
There is some really interesting low level language stuff going on. State of the art I suspect.
You sir, are part of the ungrateful and you are certainly unwilling to get any clue about the article at all. You only produce a cheap flamebait...
In his speech Wall referred to an attempt by Python to attempt to buy a high powered regular expression engine from a small African nation. This statement was later noted to be incorrect.
I think the Perl6 effort should concentrate on real short term acheivable results rather than claim to support all languages. The runtime behavior of Java or C#, for instance, could never be properly supported by Parrot due to the lack of thread support and the structural changes it would require to support these JVM/CLR thread constructs. Sure, anything could be done - but at what cost? It would take many man years of effort just for this one feature. It's not worth it if it would delay the completion of Perl 6 by several years. Ponie is a step in the right direction. Parrot should just concentrate on Perl. When people see these smaller milestones being acheived there will be more interest in the project as a whole and it would increase its chance of success. Otherwise it will likely end up like Topaz before it.
I still maintain that whoever wrote this MUST have worked in IT.
We the unwilling,
led by the unknowing,
are doing the impossible
for the ungrateful.
We have done so much for so long with so little
We are now qualified to do anything with nothing.
Blog,Twitter
For God's sake, give this man back his caffeine!
Take life easy: one bit at a time.
The Onionseems up to me....
Dry, funny, in touch with hacker culture, informed, astutely political, funny, broadly educated, an enthralling speaker, a brilliant coder and funny again...
Larry Wall is everything that Eric Raymond believes himself to be.
Athletic Scholarships to universities make as much sense as academic scholarships to sports teams.
Source here.
-Cyc
/.'s 10 Millionth
Geez as open-minded as people on Slashdot claim to be, anytime something different comes along let the flames fly!! You don't have to like Perl, but why flame Larry for that? How many of you built a an extremely popular programing language from the ground up. I mean surely Perl must have gotten something right or growing numbers of people wouldn't have used it for the last 14? years and ported it to more platforms than I can count.
Sure Larry can be a bit eccentric but he's mildly amusing and he has some really good ideas about language design that challange the current ones. He's also willing to learn from good ideas from other languages (Creating a VM for example for multiple languages to target to).
And another thing, the whole "You can't read Perl or figure out old programs" bit is getting old. You can do that in ANY language. You can also follow some generally accepted formatting rules and your code will look just fine and be readable by any halfway experienced coder.
Rant off.
The Anti-Blog
Larry Wall is clearly a genious, and actually has a huge range of interests aside from software. One year, he talked about chemistry. The last time I was at the Open Source conference, he talked about music (and demonstrated his abilities in playing about 30 different instruments). I can still remember the puzzled look on many people's faces and some even getting up and leaving. So this year, the theme is jokes ...
For the harcore Perl person, I guess the key is to look carefully for anything related to the future of the language in between all the silliness. Maybe he's trying to tell everyone there are a great many things to life outside programming. More likely he's just got a twisted sense of humor. I found the best thing to do was to kick back and enjoy it for the entertainment value - a relatively tough concept when you're not seeing it in person and only looking at a printout though :-(
Did Larry mean Painted Pony?
Don't Tread on OpenSource
of Larry's genius. Discussing 'memes', Larry happens to weave in the 'In Soviet Russia...' meme without drawing too much attention to it.
You've unintentionally nailed a fairly deep truth about both Larry and Perl.
Both are very, very amusing/accessible, and very complex.
If you skip around in an attempt to "get" either of them, looking for an executive summary, you end up walking away scratching your head, because neither was "designed" (although Larry would have no trouble with that word, I do) that way. They both evolved (and now I'd really wonder what Larry would say to *that*).
But if you give a little time towards trying to understand them, both are hugely rewarding, make you think, and have proven themselves extremely useful.
The "peeling an onion" metaphor is is especially apt - there's always something new to learn.
I forget what 8 was for.
One of the goals of Perl 6 is to make non-trivial projects possible. That's good. The way it's being done is bad. Perl was once a lightweight, extremely flexible language. Now it's become a huge ugly monster. People wanted OO, so a nasty hack was bolted on top to allow some semblance of it. Now this nasty hack is being expanded. Sure, the code's different, but the basic form is the same. Kludge upon kludge upon kludge; I'd much rather have a nice, clean, pure language (and not one with loads of irritating whitespace thank you very much).
The same goes for the syntax. All the switching between $, @ and % is really irritating (ask a newbie how to get at the length of the keys array of a hash inside a hash, for example), and the changes proposed for 6 are just making this worse -- it seems that Larry, in his infinite wisdom, wants to prefix every data type with a different hard-to-type character. Perl was only designed for the three data types, and adding more is a mess.
Perl 6 is a complete rewrite, but it keeps all the mess which has accumulated over the previous versions. This is not good. Sure, my const int $var = 27; may look neat (in the same way that, say, Pascal does), but $var isn't entirely constant, or entirely an integer, it's just a hack which makes it sort of behave like one. The whole thing is an exercise in pseudo-computer science masturbation with little real purpose except to please the managers who dislike the one thing that makes Perl special.
On a similar note is regexes. I'm an avid fan of regular expressions simply because a nondeterministic finite automata is far more flexible than linear code. However, Larry must have been smoking that cheap $2 crack when he wrote this. Does he want Perl 6 to be flex or something?
I won't be going on to use 6. It's a nice idea, but it's completely unnecessary. It won't make large projects any easier to manage (the language is still, at heart, an almighty hack -- an impressive one, but still a hack). It won't make OO any cleaner. It won't make development any faster. To put it bluntly, Perl scripts will still look less beautiful than our friend Mr Goatse. I'd prefer to use a language which has always been pure synthesis of science and engineering, not some half-baked imposter.
Perl 6 will be nice, but I'm guessing it will be the end of Perl. It can't do what it wants to do whilst still being based upon a nasty mess. There are now other options, which provide all of Perl's power and none of the mess. Sorry, but *BSD^H^H^H^HPerl is dying. Larry is buggering it up the ass without lubricants, just like Shoeboy is doing to Larry's daughter.
I've never seen people on Slashdot, as a group, claim to be open-minded.
The administrators are known to be heavy-handed responding to things they don't like. This gets keeps the dissenting extremists off the system. It also causes an all-around discomfort for people who have something to say, and a general distaste for the system for many(most? all?) other people on the system.
Moderators are often quick to moderate "troll" to anything that might spur disagreement. This prevents flamewars. It also prevents a great deal of insightful discussion, and discourages newbies from participating.
A couple months ago, I lost my moderator priviledges. I've never said anything intentionally inflammatory before on Slashdot, so I don't know for certain what specifically caused the priviledges to be revoked.
Recently, I subscribed to Slashdot. I block all ads, and view 10 ad-free pages per day. I had all the plums at first, but now some of them are gone. For example, I can no longer see articles from "The Mysterious Future," and read Slashdot every fifteen minutes to twenty minutes, for most of the day.
I'm not expecting this account to escape unscathed from this rant, but I don't care. I've been slowly maturing beyond the community fascism for a while, and I guess it's time to move on.
What's this Submit thingy do?
to know that Larry covered that in his speech and somewhat dismissed the Mother Teresa connection (the quote has been attributed to all sorts of people). Yes, he talked about every random topic you could possibly think of.
Surgeon General's Warning Viewing the following site may possible serious health risks, including breathing irregularity, stomach cramps, watery eyes, and loss of bladder control.
It's all fun and games until someone loses the key to the handcuffs.
... I don't quite understand you but that's ok. Just please don't ever offer me anything of the stuff you smoke. :-)
We suffer more in our imagination than in reality. - Seneca
I can't wait to see the latest issue.
It's not hard to keep adverts off the internet! Just install squid proxy server {the best place to put it is on your firewall machine}, and block out doubleclick.*, fastclick.net, servedby.advertising.com and any other site that chucks banners and/or cookies at you. If you're very, very nice to your ISP {or you work for your ISP and have all their root passwords}, they might even do this for you on one of their servers.
Je fume. Tu fumes. Nous fûmes!
-Cyc
/.'s 10 Millionth
Know why? They're probably using HTML::Mason to script pages that should have been flat HTML. Instead, the cutesy query string for each page gets processed for every request.
And, golly, why break the talk up into 11 "pages" in the first place? For better advertising for O'Reilly, perhaps? Or do the webmasters think that we can't handle a long vertical scroll bar? Give it to me straight up!
Before you think this is a pure troll, I love Perl and I think Larry is cool. But I have yet, after many years of working with Perl, to come to grips with the business relationship between Perl and O'Reilly. (And yes, I have lot's of Nutshell books and most of the Perl lineup on my bookshelf.) C'mon, Tim, you can make money fast without resorting to counting every click-through on the perl.com site and ensuring there's a unique ad at the top of the page. That's so 90's.
Well it's pretty clear that you're trolling on both the Ruby-vs-Perl and criticize-the-man fronts simultaneously, but I'll answer with just one short statement on the latter anyway.
Ruby is a bloated godawful idiosyncratic mess with even less elegance than Perl, and it combines that with the unpardonable sin of being horribly slow:
Execution times for recursive FP factorial(n)
Language / seconds for n=1 n=180
C 0.001 0.013
Lua 0.010 0.080
Ocaml 0.130 0.180
Perl 0.020 0.360
Python 0.110 0.780
Ruby 0.290 1.230
So, good luck to you, always nice to see a troller make the wrong decision and limit his future prospects.
Perhaps his prior "State of the Onion"s are better... can't say I've read them.
I don't know Mr. Wall, but from the way others gush about him, I suspect he is an interesting fellow, and I certainly love Perl... but his humor doesn't appear to be his strong point. :(
His talk really could have been only 10 seconds:
o The movers of the world tend to be the unreasonable.
o Deconstructionism is about understanding and breaking down "oppressive" memes.
o Postmodernism is about using a common word to mean its opposite.
o Perl5 is done, a new Perl 5 based on Parrot will be called Ponie and will be the transition step to Perl 6, which will also be based on Parrot. (Which everyone who cares about Perl already knew anyway.)
If this a typical "State of the Onion", I hope the organizers cut him down to those ten seconds sooner, rather than later...
"Why should I be content to simply live in this world, when I, as a human being, can CREATE it?" - Oertel
...Onion was good, but to hear it you had to sit through five other "State of" speeches which were terminally boring. (Well, the "State of the Snake" wasn't boring, but its schizotypic references to the "Pythonic way" of doing things went a long way toward explaining why the Python community is so paranoid.)
A hidden gem appeared later in the week when Yukihiro "Matz" Matsumoto gave his "State of the Corundum" speech. (Actually it wasn't called that. It was called "The Power and Philosophy of Ruby.") The subtitle alone ("how to create babel-17") had the packed room buzzing before he started: "He's going to turn us into uber-assassins with no sense of self!"
The slides are available online (link above) and are definitely worth taking a look at. He's kinda sensitive about his English, so don't flame him unless your Japanese is better. Matz's philosophy is also guided by this maxim: "Be humble, be minor, be happy."
Eternal vigilance only works if you look in every direction.
Maybe I'm reading this wrong, but in all those pink tennis court diagrams was the concept of Parrot as a universal interpreter for Perl 5, Perl 6 & a heap pile of other languages. While it's an interesting concept in & of itself, it suggests to me that the advent of Perl 6 will not mean the demise of Perl 5, which is something I find quite comforting. And then Wall takes the "impossible object" widget, turns it into a comb & uses that to illustrate Parrot. Whoa!
This was the most fun read I've had in a while.
"Obviously, I'm not an IBM computer any more than I'm an ashtray" (Bob Dylan)
I don't think I've *ever* read something 11 pages long online in my life.
It takes a lot of research (and hence reading) to have the background for designing any non-trivial system --- if you can just knock something out without massive reading either before or during then it's pretty much a trivial project, almost by definition.
Furthermore, the distinction between online and offline sources of data is rapidly evaporating, or moving in the online direction, so if you are are not willing to read anything long online, you're going to be pretty much out of luck.
Jesus, could he more blatantly rip off Vonnegut's style?
I think not.
I found it interesting that Larry didn't mention how this is positioned (philosophically, or technically) in relation to .Net which is offering a similar sort of framework.
I guess one big difference here will be that you probably wont have to compile your programs, even down to byte-code - it will just do it on the fly. (At least it seems that it will be that way, given the current nature of perl)
What could be cool though would be being able to call code from python, perl, php, java, and whatever from within your app (which could be in any of these languages too). But I guess that is just the whole .Net buzz anyway - Theoretically at least.
Yes, working with Perl is very much like peeling an onion. After five minutes I walk away crying.
Listening to Larry's speeches also leaves me crying, but it's crying with laughter.
You cannot apply a technological solution to a sociological problem. (Edwards' Law)
Looks like perl.com is slashdotted. So I'll *cough*karma whore*cough*.
Published on Perl.com http://www.perl.com/pub/a/2003/07/16/soto2003.html
State of the Onion 2003
By Larry Wall
This is the 7th annual State of the Perl Onion speech, wherein I tell you how Perl is doing. Perl is doing fine, thank you. Now that that's out of the way, I'd like to spend the rest of the time telling jokes.
In fact, the conference organizers have noticed that I spend most of the time telling jokes. So each year they give me a little less time, so I have to chop out more of the serious subject matter so as to leave time for the jokes.
Extrapolating several years into the future, they'll eventually chop my time down to ten seconds. I'll have just enough time to say: "I'm really, really excited about what is happening with Perl this year. And I'd like to announce that, after lengthy negotiations, Guido and I have finally decided... ["Time's up. Next speaker please"]
Well, you didn't really want to know that anyway...
Since this is a State of the Union speech, or State of the Onion, in the particular case of Perl, I'm supposed to tell you what Perl's current state is. But I already told you that the current state of Perl is just fine. Or at least as fine as it ever was. Maybe a little better.
But what you really want to know about is the future state of Perl. That's nice. I don't know much about the future of Perl. Nobody does. That's part of the design of Perl 6. Since we're designing it to be a mutable language, it will probably mutate. If I did know the future of Perl, and if I told you, you'd probably run away screaming.
As I was meditating on this subject, thinking about how I don't know the future of Perl, and how you probably don't want to know it anyway, I was reminded of a saying that I first saw posted in the 1960's. You may feel like this on some days.
We the unwilling,
led by the unknowing,
are doing the impossible
for the ungrateful.
We have done so much for so long with so little
We are now qualified to do anything with nothing
I think of it as the Blue-Collar Worker's Creed.
This has been attributed to various people, none of whom are Ben Franklin, Abraham Lincoln, or Mark Twain. My favorite attribution is to Mother Teresa. She may well have quoted it, but I don't think she coined it, because I don't think Mother Teresa thought of herself as "unwilling". After all, Mother Teresa got a Nobel prize for being one of the most willing people on the face of the earth.
It's also been attributed to the Marines in Vietnam, and it certainly fits a little better. But since I grew up in a Navy town, I'd like to think it was invented by a civilian shipyard worker working for the Navy. In any event, I first saw it posted in a work area at Puget Sound Naval Shipyard back in the 1960's. Now, you may well wondering what I was doing in a Naval Shipyard in the 1960's. That's a secret.
Anyway, you may also be wondering why I brought it up at all. Well, last year I used the table of contents from an issue of Scientific American as my outline. This year I'd like to use this as my outline.
I'd like to, but I won't.
But if I did, here's what I'd say.
From the postmodern point of view, this is a text that needs to be deconstructed. It was obviously written by someone in a position of power pretending not to be. And by making light of the plight of blue collar workers, and allowing the oppressed workers to post this copy-machine meme in the workplace, this white-collar wolf in blue-collar sheep's clothing has managed to persuade the oppressed workers that being powerless is something to be proud of.
Now, some of you young folks are too steeped in postmodernism to know anything about postmodernism, so let's review. Postmodernism in its most vicious form started out with the notion that there exist various cultural constructs, or texts, or memes,
Come play free flash games on Kongregate!
Perl remembers that you still have to use functions to cause things to happen. According to your fancy object-oriented stuff -- Java, Ruby and the like -- the recipe for making beans on toast goes like this; At least Perl remembers that you still have to execute functions. A saucepan on a stove is a function: you put something into it, it gets changed in some way {in this case it gets hotter}, and you take something out of it. Now, beans do have a measurable temperature, but to me at least it doesn't make any sense to imagine sliding the thermometer to cause the temperature of the beans to change. I expect to have to call a function to cause the beans to get hot.
Speaking of functions, I do love the way you call functions in Perl; you don't need to know or care in advance how many arguments your function is going to need, nor what to call them, because they just come through as one array which is always called @_. Oh, and Perl {and this definitely influenced PHP} indicates variable types with a prefix, so even within speech marks, it can spot a variable and insert the value.
PHP is a bit easier for creating web pages. It automates some of the things Perl makes you do for yourself {like grabbing form variables and function parameters} and you don't have to remember to send a MIME type, but comparing PHP to Perl is like comparing DJ's record decks to a Dansette autochanger. A DJ needs a level of control over the record playing process that automation would take away. Someone who just wants to listen to a stack of records from beginning to end and doesn't mind waiting a little while between songs doesn't need that level of control.
Another "feature" of Perl is that it's possible to write a piece of code you completely understand one day, and it to be so perfect, crystal-clear and obvious that commenting would spoil it; yet a mere 24 hours later, that same code whose beauty you appreciated and with which you Became One, has turned to gibberish.
Je fume. Tu fumes. Nous fûmes!
I grew up in BC, so I have no problem with Engrish. Instead I'd like to take a moment to flame his content:
It's actually a pretty good talk. Of particular amusement is his explanation (on slide 55) of why Ruby prefixes global identifiers with dollar signs.
Seems pointless to argue this point, since I can't imagine why it matters.. but Larry spoke first.
Personally, I found his speaking style mildly amusing, but only in a geeky way, and I can't stand geek humor despite being thoroughly a geek myself. I split after Guido spoke since I am a Python programmer.
It's rare that you're presented with a knob whose only two positions are Make History and Flee Your Glorious Destiny.
Wasn't that Tracy Lords?
Oh, sorry, I'm think of the Adult Film Best Actress Award...
He's fucking insane.
Sharks and some other life forms haven't evolved* much in the last little while (although I assume with the presence of humans as predators, they are now). This is because they fit their niche perfectly. Most of the languages you mention, either do not fit their niche perfectly (as in the case of C++), have a rapidly changing niche (PHP), or don't really have a niche at all (Python). C, on the other hand, is nearly perfect for its purposes.
If you look at a list of the C99 features, they are either minor syntactic sugar (I know '//' comments will change my life) or issues with the standard library or preprocessor (both of which are far from perfect). Now contrast that with C++0x. The C language itself, as a form of portable assembler, cannot be significantly approved upon. Someday, maybe the rest of those languages will achieve such greatness, but I doubt it.
* By "evolved" I mean "experienced genus-wide change due to natural selection".
"Is" is fine.
The quote was attributed to her at an earlier date, and is still attributed her.
As far as I can tell from what I've read, Perl 6 is an attempt to make the world's most unreadable language. The purpose of the "mutability" is to allow programmers to change the language on the fly, right? So when you sit down to read a piece of Perl 6 code, first you'll have to figure out what changes were made to the language. It'll be just like LISP macros, except instead of having brackets all over the place you'll have every punctuation symbol in Unicode.
(Yes, that's the smart-match operator from Perl 6.)
It's about time someone made it explicit: the reason that Perl 5 is not being retired is because Perl 6 is just something for the developers to do. It's going to be too essoteric to be useful for anything that LISP isn't used for already. So if you're actually working for a living, don't waste your time reading about Perl 6, go contribute to the Perl 5 codebase instead: it's too important to be abandoned while the lead developers go jerk off.
in L.A., you can always find a party. In Soviet Russia, the Party can always find YOU.
Does my bum look big in this?
Larry has an ulcer, poor health insurance and low income. Perl6 is large, complicated and not done yet. But they'd like to, you know, just include a little universal scripting language engine in there, as well as all the actual Perl stuff.
It's A Beautiful Mind all over again. Perl 6 is the Riemann Hypothesis. Larry Wall is John Nash, except there may never be a Nobel prize for scripting languages. It's going to kill him or drive him mad. Forget about killing Microsoft, how do we keep Larry alive and sane?
What the hell are you talking about? Objects don't have functions, they have methods. And you don't execute methods (or functions, for that matter), you pass messages to the object. A saucepan is an object because it has a state. And just because you can't design a bean object, doesn't say jack all about any particular paradigm.
You think it's advanced that Perl handles function parameters like assembler? Funny, I prefer my languages with some of the advances discovered in type systems in, oh, the last 50 years. Perl doesn't turn to gibberish, it starts out that way.
http://xahlee.org/UnixResource_dir/writ/theory_pra ctice.html
merlyn@stonehenge.com (Randal L. Schwartz) quoted:
| The difference between theory and practice in theory is much less
| than the difference between theory and practice in practice.
Popular quotes have attributes of equivocal interpretation and theatrical
display. When interpreted and pondered by the wise, it lights up a wisdom,
but dullards quote them equally, and delight in their drama. (the latter
happens a lot in Perl and unix communities.)
From American Heritage Dictionary:
theory n. pl. theories
1. a. Systematically organized knowledge applicable in a relatively
wide variety of circumstances, especially a system of assumptions,
accepted principles, and rules of procedure devised to analyze,
predict, or otherwise explain the nature or behavior of a specified
set of phenomena. b. Such knowledge or such a system. 2. Abstract
reasoning; speculation. 3. A belief that guides action or assists
comprehension or judgment: rose early, on the theory that morning
efforts are best; the modern architectural theory that less is
more. 4. An assumption based on limited information or knowledge; a
conjecture.
The word 'theory', in practice, has more meanings than in theory.
For example, in the above usage, 'theory' is used twice. In the first
instance, it is used for a purpose but not for its meaning. It is part of a
construction in a language that discuss the language itself. In theory it
does not come up, but in practice it does all the time. In practice, we can
say that the first instance of usage of the word 'theory' has no meaning
given the context. In the second appearance of the word, it has myriad of
interpretations due to the construction of the phrase.
People may mean: "The word 'theory', in practice, has more meanings than
people would think." Here the word is thus used conveniently to stand for
"mob's knowledge".
From a logical linguist's mouth, the intent might be: "The word 'theory',
outside academia, acquire more meanings and purposes than we require in
linguistics." The sensibility of such semantic content is demonstrated in
the previous paragraph.
People may say: "in theory, tomorrow'll rain." They really mean "the
broadcast station lady said that tomorrow will rain."
A detective might say, "in theory, that guy is the murderer.". He really
means: "according to my investigations, it is highly probably that that guy
is the murderer.". (dictionary definition #4.)
In a strict sense, 'theory' means systematic and organized principles
derived by scientific means (dictionary definition #1.). In a more strict
mathematical sense, 'theory' is the body of theorems, and theorem by
definition describes practices correctly always, else it is not a theorem.
It is possible for a mathematical theorem to be incorrect (we are humans,
after all), but in practice to assume that theorems can be incorrect is like
assuming one might be hit by a meteor tomorrow. Theoretically correct, but
not sensible.
As you can see, the word 'theory' is subject to wanton abuses. In fact, all
English words are subject to extraneous purposes to yield sentences or
paragraphs that has a meaningful ambiguous interpretation. (this is how
poetry works, in theory.) All in all, English is extremely malleable and
ambiguous. The phrase "The word 'theory', in practice, has more meanings
than in theory" is really silly, except in really well-defined context. In
our context, the quote amounts to illustrating the stupidity of Perlers who
don't have a solid background in logic or linguistics, but like to quote
about differences of theory vs. practice.
Larry Wall likes to mention how he had a linguistics background, and how he
utilized the (good) human qualities of English to create Perl. To the Perl
folks of beady eyes, they
Try here or here.
Just trust that there are many talented people working on Perl 6.
"There is significant evidence suggesting that phonetic alphabets (such as Hiragana) are easier to learn and extend."
-Have you learned a non-phonetic alphabet before? Personally, I have great trouble reading only "hiragana." Kanji (chinese characters) set the flow of the sentence and helps the reader find the important ideas easily. I believe that once mastered, non-phonetic alphabets allow for faster and more accurate transfer of information. Since language is such an important tool throughout an individual's life, being easy to learn is probably the least important aspect of a good language.
"I could go into what Wittgenstein would say about that, but instead I'll just assert that conversations are not stored in plain-text, they're compressed. That's why you remember the gist long after the specific phrasing is gone."
-Maybe you should go into what Wittgenstein said . . . To me there has always been a clear distinction to me between speakers that are constantly converting languages in their heads and speakers that are actually using the second language to think. I have seen students understand things in Japanese (hw assignments) but when they return to the English speaking world for a week, they never retrieved that information (in time to do their hw). It is almost like in such cases the brain is storing this information in slightly different places.
"The Strong Sapir-Whorf Hypothesis has been largely discredited."
-Again, you might want to give a little more information than "so and so said so." Japanese as a second language speakers who do not change the way they think when speaking Japanese are very often misunderstood and rejected. Proper usage of a language requires certain assumptions which effects human thought. Just the type of words you will learn first (becuase they are considered the most important) will limit the type of thought possible when communicating with others.
"No, you need an interchange format. I assert that programming languages are a low-bandwidth method for communicating between brain-machines and computer-machines."
I think he is trying to point out that people can talk to one another easily because they have similar assumptions and machines can talk to one another easily because they are similar in design. However, when people and machines try to talk there is a "culture gap" that needs to also be addressed.
Maybe your and my comments are a result of culture gap? In which case we have further proven Matsumoto san's point about the importance of the assumptions (ways of thought, culture, human components) behind all languages, in which case I thank you for your participation.
Sdelat' Ameriku velikoy Snova!
It's interesting that these virtual machines exist primarily for strategic reasons. Each group wants to control their run-time platform. So they have to insert an interpretive layer between their language and the operating system. Why? Because the operating system is usually from Microsoft, and Microsoft keeps changing their API to lock people into Microsoft products.
It's worth noting that taking this route implies a battle with Microsoft. They hate it when someone puts a portable platform on top of their OS. Look what they did to Java, Netscape, Borland... This decision puts Perl on a collision course with Microsoft.
On a side note, I do not know Larry Walls feelings concerning biological evolution. I can say, however, that it would be wrong to assume that all Christians concider the theory of evolution incompatible with Biblical truth.
ever?
Have you learned a non-phonetic alphabet before?
I've learned enough to know how difficult it would be to be fluent. Why do they teach Chinese children pinyin? Why do the Japanese use hiragana, katakana, and romaji if kanji is so superior?
I believe that once mastered, non-phonetic alphabets allow for faster and more accurate transfer of information.
Faster, I might give you, but given the redundancy, interoperability, and modularity in phonetic alphabets I think that accuracy is not on your side. Europe took over the world because of their language, not in spite of it.
To me there has always been a clear distinction to me between speakers that are constantly converting languages in their heads and speakers that are actually using the second language to think.
Unfortunately, the history of Psychology and AI has shown that introspection and observation teaches you jack-all about what's actually going on inside someone's head. Yes, languages that are fluent are implemented in a different part of the brain than for those that are conscious symbol-manipulation, but that doesn't tell you anything about what format is being used underneath. By analogy, I challenge you to demonstrate whether your computer uses ones-complement or twos-complement arithmetic without opening the case.
Again, you might want to give a little more information than "so and so said so."
There's this thing called Google, please try and learn how to use it. Vocabulary does not limit thought, ideas limit thought -- otherwise how can you think something when you have the word "on the tip of your tongue"?
I approve of your cultural-gap interpretation of Matsumoto's claim. And my local Wittgenstein guru did not sign off on that part of my argument.
Restrict seems like a questionable attempt to graft bits of an effect system onto C's already tenuous type system. I'm not convinced that it's a great idea, but to tell you the truth, I haven't looked into it enough to be sure. Some people have, though.
But yeah, you're right: if it works it certainly is a significant development.
I am interested in language design and once did a fair amount of programming in Perl. So although I don't like it right now, I am interested in where it's going (and frankly, right now I'm having trouble figuring that out). Part of that interest is expressed as what I believe are valid criticisms (such as the parent) which I'd like Perl advocates to respond to. And some of it is an attempt to be funny -- I'm sorry if my attempts were so bad as to offend you, perhaps you should moderate them appropriately?
I am also in the process of praying for protection of those poor souls who post to let us know that they are considering learning Perl.
I dunno, the response to lini's question scares me.
So the best case scenario is that understanding Perl 6 programs written by gurus will require knowing the syntax of a bunch of other Parrot languages? Allowing you to write gluable libraries (like .Net) is one thing, but intermixing languages is just evil.
I'm sorry, but how is this funny?
Leaving that aside, why is everybody so impressed by bandying about of terms like "deconstruct"? Just because you don't understand them, it doesn't mean he does. Fairly evidently he has little grip on what post-modernism is, given his tortuous justification of the description of Perl as a "post-modern" language. That's fine -- it's largely bullshit anyway, and it's irrelevant -- but why go on and on about it?
Wall is clearly set on establishing some kind of reputation for being, as he put it before, a "renaissance man". That means he tells everyone he's learning Japanese, and explains the dubious claims to being an expert linguist (Chomsky he ain't). The fact is he created a useful computer language, but without innovating in any spectacular way. Therefore he has to make out that it's part of some grand philosophical vision. Implementing regular expressions doesn't make you Descartes, however much spurious verbiage you bolt on.
That he bangs on about quantum mechanics when talking about God, and makes purportedly learned jokes about the Soviet Union does NOT mean he's a genius. Please people, grow up! And look for intellectual role models elsewhere
Sometimes he writes well. CatB is good. I also really like his rebuttal to SCO, although it benefited from other contributors.
His detractors make fun of stuff like this.
I don't think Perl is hard to follow. I think Perl makes it extremely easy to write hard to follow code though. But hard to follow code can be written in any language.
There are good programmers and bad programmers. Good programmers can write clear, easy to follow code in most languages (exceptions being Malbolge and Intercal). Bad programmers manage to make life incredibly difficult no matter what their chosen tongue.
I'd be reluctant to use Perl at work for any code that has to be maintained by anyone except myself. It's a very expressive language and it's way to easy for different, equally competent coders to come up with incompatible idioms. In constrast, a language like Java places strong restrictions on the way you approach coding in it. On the one hand this is a good thing because you can quickly figure out what another coder is doing. It's not so good because it sometimes prevents you finding the neatest (and easiest to follow) way of doing something.
That said, I really enjoy coding in Perl for fun for the same reasons I like Go and composing music: intellectual stimulation. I usually write Perl programs to solve real problems but non-critical ones. That way I can have fun exploring different ways of solving problems.
"Where is the wisdom we have lost in knowledge, and where is the knowledge we have lost in information?"-T.S.Eliot
This "article" reminds me of the song "Alice's Restaurant", by Arlo Guthrie, where he describes a police officer who "talked for forty-five minutes, and nobody understood a word that he said." I mean, I greatly respect Larry Wall and what he's accomplished, but that had to be *the* lamest speech I have ever read. If he had nothing to say, he could at least have tried to say it more succinctly.
(which he stole form MIT), and the second-half of fetchmail
(which he continued from earlier work).
THIS IS NOT SERIOUS WORK FOR ANY PROGRAMMER!
Your serious statement that Eric is "very important to present and future of
computer programming", is at best comical.
...since your response was entirely too polite and reasonable for designation as a flame. I am sure Matz would have no problem with a discussion of his ideas.
I don't believe Matz would disagree with you. He only said ideographic alphabets are a "great invention," not that they were better than phonetic alphabets. He even joked about it being a defense against cultural imperialism because it is so hard for non-Japanese to learn.
A discussion between Wittgenstein and Matsumoto about their link through Wittgenstein pupil Alan Turing would indeed be worth considering. What Matz is saying here is that he translates English to Japanese before thinking about it or storing it in memory. The test is not whether he remembers the gist long after the phrasing is lost. The test, I suspect, is whether he can remember the English phrasing shortly after hearing it. Or does he remember it in Japanese and translate it back to English again? This would be fairly easy to test since his translations to English are imperfect (often ignoring pluralization, for instance). I imagine Wittgenstein would approve of such a test, but disapprove of drawing overly broad conclusions from the results.
While Babel-17 was, in fact, based on the strong form of the Whorfian hypothesis ("language determines thought"), I don't think anyone would argue that Matz's formulation ("language influence human thought") is the strong form. Many even find it hard to believe Sapir and Whorf themselves believed the strong form (although there are plenty of hints they did). But there is widespread acceptance of the weak form.
Missing from the transcriptions of the talk I've found on the web was the uncanny imitation of a modem squeal Matz did after reading this quote.
I doubt Matz would disagree with your assertion. He also argues they should be optimized for the human side of the communication.
I suspect Wittgenstein would have a great deal of sympathy for some of the thinking Matz is using, but little patience for some of the ways he phrases things. I suspect "Every conversation is stored in my brain in Japanese" would set off some alarm bells in his head, prompting something along the lines of "What do we really mean when we use the language in that way?" Perhaps, though, he would attribute the awkwardness in the phrasing to the fact that he was using a second language. Wittgenstein himself gave up German when he abandoned the Vienna School and taught in English at Cambridge.
One could even argue Turing's inability to get across to Wittgenstein the gist of Goedel's proof derived in part from the fact that Goedel expressed the conclusions in a sloppy fashion before he published the actual paper. That sloppy version could easily have benefited from some good, old Wittgensteinian deconstruction.
Eternal vigilance only works if you look in every direction.
Damn, good responses. It's nice to actually hear from somebody who heard the actual talk. You win. :)
Hey man, if not for this, then what other point could the Friend/Foe system have? :)
and the first word that came to mind is 'certifiably...'
- rabs
I was wondering if somebody was going to find that...
Does it need to be done in assembler? Does anyone have something other than a twos-complement machine they could try this on:
That's just insulting.
Ruby says "bwarghhhhh!"