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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."

11 of 230 comments (clear)

  1. My experience by m00nun1t · · Score: 5, Insightful

    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
    1. Re:My experience by teromajusa · · Score: 5, Funny

      Yeah, it does. Hard to follow at times, but very clever. Would you rather he just struted around the stage saying "developers developers developers"?

  2. In Soviet Russia... by cwernli · · Score: 5, Funny

    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.

    1. Re:In Soviet Russia... by Daniel+Dvorkin · · 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.
  3. Larry Wall is Ned Flanders. by mfh · · Score: 5, Funny

    The similiarities are beyond skin-deep

    --
    The dangers of knowledge trigger emotional distress in human beings.
  4. Re:seriously by Branc0 · · Score: 5, Insightful
    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..

    --

    rm -rf /home/leia

  5. Threat to Perl by Captain+Large+Face · · Score: 5, Funny

    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.

  6. Oh, the humanity! by kars · · Score: 5, Funny
    If you feed one of these diagrams to a black hole, it turns into a piece of spaghetti.

    But let's not, and say we did.


    For God's sake, give this man back his caffeine!
    --
    Take life easy: one bit at a time.
  7. Hmmm by gowen · · Score: 5, Insightful

    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.
  8. Re:seriously by Ender+Ryan · · Score: 5, Insightful
    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.

    --
    Sticking feathers up your butt does not make you a chicken - Tyler Durden
  9. Why expect anything else? by JSkills · · Score: 5, Insightful
    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 :-(