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."

Comments

My experience

[m00nun1t]

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.

Re:My experience

[Mesozoic44]

Well - I'm not fond of Perl (although I do see its power) but I did hear this talk at OSCON and it was one of the most playful and thoughtful talks I've heard in a while. Not thoughtful as in George Steiner's musings on postmodernism - but thoughtful in that he was teasing and suprising the audience so that they were completely engaged. It was sort of like watching a magic act where rabbits were being pulled out of hats at unexpected angles. I think what you're missing in the written text is the timing and tone of voice that he used - sorry you weren't there. It was fun.

This explains a *lot* about perl. . I thought the same thing in two ways: (1) Perl is a motley and this shows why; (2) Perl needed someone like Wall for the community to form. Constructing both a language and community is more like performance art than an exercise in BNF. In general the audience enjoys the performance when the performer is also engaged - and I suspect he was having a blast.

If you like your philosophy written more seriously - please take some Tristan Tzara as an antidote.

Re:My experience

[-brazil-]

Yeah, it does. Hard to follow at times, but very clever

Indeed. "Hard to follow" is just about the worst attribute a piece of code can have, while "clever" doesn't get you anything except bragging rights among other kamikaze coders.

Re:seriously

[Branc0]

why doesn't he aknowledge that Perl has reached its goals long ago and give up development..

Maybe because the goals evolve has the language evolves..

Cheap

[FullClip]

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...

Hmmm

[gowen]

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.

Re:Hmmm

[gowen]

but stills seems to know his place in the greater scheme of all things hacking

But what exactly has he hacked? A kernel config tool that everyone else hated, fetchmail (a program that speaks POP3 and SMTP and is notorious for eating mail), and a few quick hacks for converting PNGs, some trivial solitaire-type games and a few others. (Info from here) Essentially, a bunch of applets. Not completely unimpressive, but given he's been at it 20 years, it's hardly the output of the uber-hacker he likes to present himself as.

Now compare that to Larry ("patch", "rn", "perl", "metaconfig") Wall...

Re:Hmmm

[Artifex]

Larry Wall is everything that Eric Raymond believes himself to be.

They're rather more like the Wozniak and Jobs of the computer worl- oh, wait, guess I can't say that. I'll say it anyway.

Seriously, though, both of these guys are very important to the present and future of computer programming. However, they fill different niches, much like the two Steves. They're not in direct competition. They're both visionaries, but one is more apt to build tools and the other is more apt to evangelize, in order to see their visions come true. I don't know these guys in real life, but I would be surprised to find any enmity between them, which I'd expect to find if one of their egos got deflated by the other's abilities.

A guy tried to impress me once by saying he once worked for or with ESR in some fashion. He couldn't explain exactly what he did or learned from the experience, so I treated it as starry-eyed syndrome or self-ego-building and ignored it. After all, when you work for an evangelist, your time is spent pushing the vision. It's hard to easily point to projects being done now and say that the Cathedral and the Bazaar and Magic Cauldron essays were directly responsible, but their perceivable impact will build over time. Oh, and there's something about him and open source, too, (whatever that is)...

The people I actually look up to when it comes to programming, on the other hand, almost always know perl, or at least feel inadequate if they don't. While it's not hard, learning it is an indication that you're serious about what you're doing. Larry's tools incorporate his ideas about how things should be done, (or that there's really not any one way some things have to be done, actually) and that invites quicker uptake on the part of people just trying to get things done.

(I'm only a dilettante, myself, but even I've been affected by Mr. Wall, anyway - my worthless claim to relevance, when I futilely try to impress people with name-dropping, is that I emailed Kibo when I was a kid asking about his usenet-searching script, and he told me this Larry guy had a new language, and I should talk to him for details on how to parse it. If only I was as willing to learn at the time as Larry always has seemed to be, to teach! Which is yet another trait he seems to share with Mr. Wozniak.)

Re:seriously

[Ender Ryan]

Seriously, why the hell was the parent modded +5 insightful? Unbelievable....

Languages evolve, and that's all there is to it. Should development of C, C++, PHP, Python, Ruby, etc. be stopped because they have acheived their initial goals?

No, of course not. Let them evolve, as they all have done and continue to do.

Enough with the flames already

[Christianfreak]

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.

Re:seriously

[skryche]

why doesn't he aknowledge that Perl has reached its goals long ago and give up development.

Maybe he likes developing Perl.

Why expect anything else?

[JSkills]

When it comes to these "State of the Onion" speeches Larry Wall gives, he always has a theme. And what he does is actually makes the theme of the talk more prominent than anything he is going to say about the Perl language. Note the first sentence of this year's speech - he says Perl is ok, and now that he's got that out of the way, onto his theme.

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 :-(

Re:my favorite

[(startx)]

wow. just, wow. That scares the hell out of me how accurate that is.

unintentionally insightful

[abulafia]

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.

Re:seriously

[teromajusa]

Guess this poster (and a few people with moderation points as well) doesn't realize that thats pretty much what they're doing with Perl 6. They're not throwing out the whole language, but they're cleaning up some of the syntax, improving object support and redesigning the engine itself.

Larry funny?

[Manax]

I'm suprised, but I didn't really find it that funny, or that informative. Most of the humor struck me as quite sophmoric. Which, in turns, suprised me that many on /. think he is funny, then didn't suprise me quite so much....

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...

.Net competitor?

[AnEmbodiedMind]

This is pretty interesting... It looks like they are making a sort of "Common Language Runtime" out of Parrot, and letting it run various languages on top of it.

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.

Good v. Bad. Work v. play

[mysta]

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.