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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."
For those who are wondering, a 'pony' is cockney rhyming slang for crap:
Pony and trap: crap.
Source here.
-Cyc
/.'s 10 Millionth
I have no idea if Larry Wall is like this all the time, but in his annual State of the Onion speech, what you see here is normal, and I think generally seen as just a fun aspect of Perl culture. YMMV.
DO NOT LEAVE IT IS NOT REAL
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.
That's actually the original "in Soviet Russia" joke, from long before Yaakov Smirnoff made it a tiresome catchphrase. It was something that cynical Russians used to say: "Under capitalism, the Party tells us, man oppresses man. Under communism, it's the other way around."
The correlation between ignorance of statistics and using "correlation is not causation" as an argument is close to 1.
Athletic Scholarships to universities make as much sense as academic scholarships to sports teams.
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.
...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.
Which is somewhat related to a statement made by John Kenneth Galbraith, "Under capitalism, man exploits man. Under communism, it is the opposite."
"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!"
Well, you could always click on the link to the single page printable version.
I have written some code in Java and Perl for doing similar stuff (using text templates), and the perl code looks like someone is explaining in plain english. With perl5 and modules from CPAN , one can write very clean code.
S
Popularity for open source tools has something to do with usefulness, quality, availability (on various platforms) and so on. Unlike both Windows and VB, Perl has never had a significant marketing campaign - it got lucky in the Unix/shell environment, then in hitting the CGI niche in the mid-90s, and then again in hitting the bioinformatics niche in the late 90s (getting lucky this many times begins to look like something other than luck, though).
I use Perl a lot, and despite the near-vertical learning curve at times (when you try to go from trivial to medium size programs, the error messages can be fairly horrible), it is just incredibly useful. The existence of pre-tested modules on CPAN for major chunks of functionality helps enormously - modules I've used recently include Mail::IMAPClient (enabling a specialised biff in just 20 or so lines), Parse::RecDescent (enabling parsing of router configs with very little code, i.e. it's a well tested Yacc for Perl), and various email manipulation modules.
Perl probably isn't the world's easiest language to learn, but neither is English - both have a large number of peculiarities, but once you know them well they are very pleasant to use. Although I am looking at OCaml now (because it is high level but performs as well as C/C++ for most things), it is not as easy to code in as Perl, so I doubt I'll stop using Perl.
I also know Python, and it's very nice, but it doesn't have CPAN. In fact, Parrot could be the killer platform for Python if the Python community get behind it, just by allowing Python to call the enormous CPAN module library (2,000 plus modules). Perl 6 may be more significant for bringing us Parrot than for the sometimes scary language features.
Try here or here.
Just trust that there are many talented people working on Perl 6.
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
Pick HTML::Mason for doing this and much more with mod_perl and apache