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State of the Onion 7

Posted by michael on 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."

2 of 230 comments (clear)

  1. Impossible Object Oriented by djeaux · · Score: 4, Interesting
    It's worth reading to page 7 just to see Larry color the "impossible object oriented" widget. And then add the "universal clarification tool."

    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)
  2. To summarise the summary... by mihalis · · Score: 4, Interesting

    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?