State of the Onion 7

← Back to Stories (view on slashdot.org)

Posted by michael on Thursday July 17, 2003 @12:35AM from the cry-cry-cry dept.

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."

11 of 230 comments (clear)

Min score:

Reason:

Sort:

Ponie by radio4fan · 2003-07-17 00:53 · Score: 4, Informative

To be sure, none of them are good reasons, but I'm told it will make the London.pm'ers deliriously happy if I say, "I want a Ponie".
And I do want a Ponie.

For those who are wondering, a 'pony' is cockney rhyming slang for crap:
Pony and trap: crap.
1. Re:Ponie by fruey · 2003-07-17 00:57 · Score: 3, Informative
  
  It's also twenty five quid. Like a monkey, a pony, a bluey, a score, a ton, and so on..
  
  --
  Conversion Rate Optimisation French / English consultant
2. Re:Ponie by blech · 2003-07-17 01:07 · Score: 4, Informative
  
  On the London.pm IRC channel, people talk a lot about wanting ponies, especially when people are (or are percieved to be) upset.
  
  "I wanna pony!"
  "Here, stroke the lovely pony."
  "Pony drop!" - lots of ponies for the terminally stressed.
  
  The origins of the phrase are lost in the mists of time. However, it's possible that someone was acting quite a lot like a seven year old at the time.
  
  --
  DO NOT LEAVE IT IS NOT REAL
You would be surprised... by Cyclopedian · 2003-07-17 01:23 · Score: 4, Informative

to know that quote is attributed to Mother Teresa.
Source here.
-Cyc

--
/.'s 10 Millionth
You would also be surprised... by interiot · 2003-07-17 02:05 · Score: 4, Informative

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.
Re:In Soviet Russia... by Daniel+Dvorkin · 2003-07-17 02:09 · Score: 5, Informative

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.
Re:Hmmm by gowen · 2003-07-17 02:39 · Score: 3, Informative

He's writing a book entitled The Art Of Unix Programming and sets out a standard for those he deems wise enough to help
"senior cadre with established public reputations for excellence across the entire Unix community will be directly quoted in the body of the book."
adding that
"senior contributors must not only be the best, but be known to be the best."
I don't think theres any doubt he is numbering himself amongst the qualified, since he writes
"I have done the heavy lifting in the writing and research department"
(Gee, thanks Eric). Oh, and did I mention the history of buffer overflows and braindead design decisions in fetchmail?

--
Athletic Scholarships to universities make as much sense as academic scholarships to sports teams.
The State of the... by freeBill · 2003-07-17 02:49 · Score: 3, Informative

...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.
Re:In Soviet Russia... by thesatirist · 2003-07-17 02:54 · Score: 4, Informative

Which is somewhat related to a statement made by John Kenneth Galbraith, "Under capitalism, man exploits man. Under communism, it is the opposite."
Re:Who else noticed... by RDW · 2003-07-17 03:33 · Score: 3, Informative

"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.
Re:Enough with the flames already by sisukapalli1 · 2003-07-17 03:41 · Score: 3, Informative

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.
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