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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."
PHP was originally a Perl application.
Actually, that happened at OSCON 2003. After Larry's talk, Guido van Rossum talked about the state of Python, Shane Caraveo talked about the state of PHP, Monty Widenius and David Axmark talked about the state of MySQL, Ted T'so talked about the state of the Linux kernel, and Greg Stein talked about the state of the Apache Foundation (not specifically Apache httpd).
Long night.
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I was at the OsCon '04 Keynotes. Larry Wall's State of The Onion Address was entertaining, if not a bit hard to follow at times. When he was discussing ADHD it seemed as though he was mostly using it to contrast his "opposite" problem, and make the point that any kind of singular personality (strictly ADHD bounciness, or strictly task-switching deficiency) was a bad thing, or at least not as productive as a good balance.
In his talk about Tom Christiansen his tone seemed to be half humour/half endearing. I'd say there's no ill will between them, or between Larry Wall and people who have ADHD in general.
If you run xscreensaver -demo and follow along you might get a bit clearer picture of what he wanted, but then again maybe not. Half the time it seemed like he was running the wrong screen saver, or the screen saver he chose didn't appear to apply to his topic. Then again, at other times (like where he demonstrates how his mind solves puzzles) it was very funny and appropriate.
OT: What I really want to see is the "Life, the Universe, and Everything" keynote transcription, it was the last one that night. In it I saw perl6 extensions used to create variables with dual values, and Conway's Game of Life written in perl...in Klingon! If anyone has a link to this program, or can remember the CPAN::Klingon module's name it'd be great.
It was great being at the State of the Onion address in person, but from reading last year's address, I came away with the opinion that Larry Wall is a better author than orator, and his language can be mildly stilted at times. But what more could be expected from a hacker?
I agree with you, though I have to point out: There's really no way to determine whether
will return TRUE or FALSE without knowing the context, hence, in scalar context, will return TRUE in the "is not false" meaning of the word. However, I think it's also somewhat clear that:in thatthe feature set of Perl 6 is now stable, and yes,
there has been a delay, and yes,
Larry seems to have great confidence in the Perl development team, and yes,
his wife Gloria has veto power over the progress of the team toward the new Perl version.
Granted parsing the whole 4-page expression to evaluate such a simple expression is probably not that efficient. Maybe it's time to search CPAN for the Onion::WhatsItMean module.
Good luck to Larry with Perl 6 and his health.
Everything I've ever learned the hard way was based on a statistically invalid sample.