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Larry Wall's State of the Onion 8
zachlipton writes "Perl.com has posted Larry Wall's State of the Onion talk from this year's Open Source Convention and The Perl Conference. Through the use of various screensavers, Wall talks a bit about himself, and of course, Perl and Perl 6."
I really enjoy both Perl and Ruby (Ruby even more so because everything's an object and the syntax for iterators/blocks/closures).
Would be interesting to see if parrot successfully unites various scripting languages.
Internal Server Error
Its all and interesting (perhaps) but to be truthful the website post seems to be a bit of a rant but not alot of news there (In temrs of it being "Stuff that matters")
Interesting comments on being in hospital and getting IV fluids & surgery - I guess its a reminder of how unpredictable people are compared with machines. (Insert obligate Windows joke here).
However, the lack of content could explain why the first six posts well all pretty uninteresting or off topic.
Serious question - does this site really have much "news" as such?
Michael
There is no cryptographic solution to the problem where the intended receiver and the attacker are the same entity.
Those who are use to wit understand it to be along the lines of Garrison Kellior. I wonder if anyone would ever have discovered him had he not written a stepping stone lanuage like Perl.
Best Quote:
Can you begin to see why I have a special mental relationship with these screensavers? Maybe I'm a little bit crazy, but I can't decide if it's psychotic or neurotic. You know the difference, don't you? A psychotic thinks that 2 + 2 = 5. A neurotic knows that 2 + 2 = 4, but it makes him nervous.
He is valuable, but he's more Salon.com instead of Perl.com, ya know what I mean?
There is a rage in me to defy the order of the stars, despite their pretty patterns.
Yeah, I do see the word Perl mentioned occasionally, but mostly it just seems like a lot of incoherent rambling and hospital anecdotes...I guess I'm wondering where the important part is, and why it made the front page?
I hate to add to a somewhat flamey AC, but after reading just part of the article, I could not help but to ask "WTF?". Lots of rambling, offtopic, bouncing back and forth and non-sense. I gave up. And I LOVE Perl (the only language I can actually do some work with).
With all due respect to Larry (and much is due) I have personally made more sense after several cold ones. Still can't wait for Perl 6 tho.
Tequila: It's not just for breakfast anymore!
Funny, that's how felt when I saw and used Perl. And then I gave up.
Guess the things we make reflect the makers' personas.
Everything in Python is also an object, it has a clean and terse syntax and the language and it's libraries is already a reality. I've been using it to do some SERIOUS work at a telecomunications company. It's not a toy language.
perl 5 isn't fucked, it's _here_. done. perl 6 though, is fucked. parrot is great, but what exists of perl 6 is crap, and is changing rather slowly.
Through the use of various screensavers
I hear that after the conference he was attacked by several members of ScreenPeace and PETS (People for Ethical Treatment of Screensavers).
Thanks for Perl, Its a cool lang to solve problems, coding fast powerfull code.
About you, hehe, I am happy you are now active again. Cool. You are something like a hero or a friend, maybe both.
Good Luck
--Tei.
-Woof woof woof!
George Bush's State of the Union speech.
Yeah, once Ruby has at least UTF-8 everywhere, I'll be all over it.
GCHQ Quantum Insert installed. If only our tongues were made of glass, how much more careful we would be when we speak
I hear that after the conference he was attacked by several members of ScreenPeace and PETS (People for Ethical Treatment of Screensavers).
Absolutely miserable. You FUCKING fail it.
Larry is a bit off the wall, but I really wish other industry luminaries gave these annual 'State of [whatever]' doohickeys.
Or, perhaps they do, and I've missed it. Examples.. Linux could do an annual State of Linux, Bill Gates could do an annual State of Microsoft.. People I'd particularly like to see do an annual address on what they're up to would be Scott McNealy and Steve Jobs (he's great at the various Apple events, but perhaps something more.. serious).
Yes, there is a distro of linux with all of it's utilities written in perl. I don't know how valuable the project was, but it did show what could be done.
Would be fun to watch.
Harald
Holy crap, karma points are like crack. Seriously. I get one point and I start twitching. This cannot be healthy. . . can you buy karma?
heh, you obviously havent read any of his speeches before... :-)
Anyone there in person, who can report how he meant it?
Not that much about Perl 6, but Wall is certainly a brilliant geek-stand-up-comedian!
Positional languages like COBOL and Python make for difficult-to-maintain modules (especially when you're not the one who wrote them in the first place).
And everything being an object is not necessarily a good thing either - a lot more overhead is involved when you have to create an entire object to do some simple communications.
Been there - done that - sold the t-shirt to the next idiot in line.
Been there, Done that, Sold the t-shirt to the next idiot in line
PHP was originally a Perl application.
Yeah I had the same response. He does eventually get to the point though, and quite a cleverly made point. All the contibutors to Perl are like his little screensavers, and doctors and nurses, all performing surgery on each other in a big ol' Perl love-fest. It's all about the Perl modules, and he really appreciates all those who contribute. I imagine this is one of those "you had to be there" speeches.
I was recently having a discussion about Perl, and it briefly touched upon Perl 6 and its targetting the Parrot virtual machine. I would like to know what slashdotters think about the issue.
.NET. I am really
So, just to hear your opinion: do you think Perl is going to be better off for having a virtual machine? I personally think it's much easier to get good performance from
higher-level languages than machine code (which is possibly why Parrot code seems to be more high level than typical machine code). Of course, going further away from
the source language (thus lower level) increases chances of interoperability with other languages, which is something that Microsoft has realized with
a bit doubtful about whether Parrot is a wise choice for Perl, but I must admit I have not been following things very closely.
Please correct me if I got my facts wrong.
For those that don't know of Damian Conway, he is one hell of way out programmer (had to be an Aussie!):
Lingua::Romana::Perligata -- Perl for the XXI-imum Century
For instance there is now OO COBOL but the only people that use it are COBOL programmers who are stuck, perhaps because of their company's dictates, perhaps by choice, with COBOL. In the same way perl may be heading towards irrelevance wrt "mainstream" language. I've written commercial perl in the past, it was a pain then and it's still a pain now. The thing is that now there are alternative languages in the same space (python, ruby etc., php for web side) that do the "perl thing" better than perl.
Perl was great, it introduced many people to programming, just like COBOL did. But now it's time to move on. To move on to languages that learnt from perl, that improved on it, that don't have to drag around a syntax and culture that values neat tricks and trying to guess what the programmer really meant over providing the needed building blocks and letting you build code that does what you say, not what it thinks it heard you say. Or even, dare I say it, to move on to languages outside the perl family for some programming and choose the right tool for the job for a change.
I'd prefer to think of this as provocative rather than a flame, there is a difference you know.
In that one little speech we learned quite a bit -
He was telling us, using screensavers as visual aids, what has been happening with himself over the last year - just like the "State of the Union" is supposed to do.
He was talking a bit about the make-up of the design team - using screensavers to illustrate how he sees the way other team members think.
He was also reminding us to think "outside the box" - using screensavers as visual aids for his talking points is very novel. And he was reminding us at the same time with a couple of of those points that people behind Perl don't necessarily think like the rest of you.
The greatest achievements in history are usually from people who thought "outside the box".
Remember, Larry Wall was a linguist who created a programming language that was simply made for generating reports easily.
And if you know anything about Asperger's Syndrome, you know that an Aspie's sense of humor is different from the rest of you.
I found the article very entertaining as well as informative as to why the state of Perl 6 may not be as far along as some desire. Sometimes things in life happen outside of programming.
Been there, Done that, Sold the t-shirt to the next idiot in line
I agree. Larry Wall is a good guy I'm sure, having given us Perl which is a fabulous tool and is free in all senses. But IMO his "State of the Onion" speeches are seldom if ever worth the effort. I framkly pass on reading them in full now, once I'm sure that a given one is the same as the rest.
"that's not encryption - it's a new perl script that I'm working on..." - from some Matrix parody
Depends on whether you consider the software for the Human Genome Project to be serious or not, i guess. :-)
karma(elastiC) = +555 (very positive)
open4free ©
Or is this a new thing?
How crude.
Yeah it's really fun when someone has indented four or five structures in and I'm looking at a hardcopy print and have to suffer through wrapped around lines that just seem to go on and on and it's really a blast to try and see which line goes with which indent.
If a print layout system cannot handle the particular method of layout used by a language, the fault lies with the layout system, not with the language.
Indent-blocked languages need to be set in print with the help of graphic elements like vertical alignment lines or block highlighting. When that isn't done and the result causes confusion, then blame the publishers or even the book author. Blaming the language is silly.
Larry is not an insensitive clod.
hah, this is called 'irony'--how does it feel?
perhaps you Perl-loving trolls out there will have more restraint in the future, when YOU think an article isn't news!
Or at least, that's how the sheep of society label them.
Slashdot is 95% sheep.
Strange and indecipherable, but somehow you find that you like it.
That was a truly beautiful speach, technically and poetically. Would have given even Cicero a run for the money.
--
All rites reversed 2010
Hey, at least he gave you fair warning up front.
And here I was thinking, "How the heck did Larry Wall come to be associated with The Onion? And does this mean that maybe they'll bring back their free archives?"
p
In Korea, long hair is for old people!
PHP is getting to be the same thing. I'm sure it's the unnecessarily alien (or as Larry might call it, elegant and succinct) syntax that has caused a drop in Perl usage (in terms of live code). PHP/Java/C does the same thing Perl does, but more wordy. Now Perl might have a VM? So much for the benefits of all those single character operators when they could have been using functions like everyone else.
This is a theory, not a proof.
Often wrong but never in doubt.
I am Jack9.
Everyone knows me.
When do we get Perl 6? Do we think it will be sometime in 2006? 2007?
How much longer before the current work on Parrot and Ponie bear fruit that regular people can use?
I want to start playing with the OO stuff from Apocalypse 12. I want it NOW!
It seems like no one's talking about this... Are there any dates at all?
It seems like Larry's talk had no content becuase everything that's going on now is too abstract and behind the scenes.
The 5.8 and 5.9 codelines are moving along, Perl 6 is still in design/pre-alpha, and that's all for now. Later...
Always like to do my bit to help karma-crack addicts :)
PHP was originally a Perl application.
It's kind of like when you get to the age where you're strong enough to beat up your dad!
It's being used at NASA, NOAA, Intel (check out the next Intel Compilers Evaluation CD [I think they call it the developer's CD now] - it's got Ruby on it ;-). There's the Rails Web app framework that's getting rave reviews.
Lots of cool stuff going on in the Ruby-world now.
You have to install the xscreensaver software. It should include an app called 'xscreensaver-demo', which if you run, will let you select and view the slides he names.
That's for Linux and Unix - not sure how you can easily do the same on other OSes.
Larry Wall is a good guy I'm sure, having given us Perl which is a fabulous tool and is free in all senses.
Yeah, it's free as in free love - degrading, unsatisfying, and leaves you with a variety of embarrassing diseases.
Smalltalk implementations are just not as well integrated with the Unix environment as Ruby is. They require this huge, language-specific, monolithic environment around them, practically an OS into itself. The only such language that's really been successful is Java.
Are you adequate?
18 eh? I guess you must live in one of these backward countries where the age of consent is stupidly high.
I totally concur, by the way. She's a right foxy geek.
Does anybody have the article text?
What? The benefit of the single-character operators was brevity, not performance.
As I said.
What does that have to do with Perl getting a VM?