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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."
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?
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).
Everything in Smalltalk is an object too. It also has a clean and clear syntax. It has been around for DECADES! Why not use that if everything being an object, and clean and clear syntax, are so revolutionary?
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
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.
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
Depends on whether you consider the software for the Human Genome Project to be serious or not, i guess. :-)
How crude.
Surely too many, not enough and just right are subjective judgements. There is no need to use any parentheses in OO, either in practicality and certainly not in thought process, it is an imposition of the language which may make it easier to understand, to some degree, by some. The contents of parentheses are just elements of a command: a vectored command (embedded or not); doing away with parentheses, and the linear thought process of procedural programming it all arises from, could allow proper n-dimensional programming and OO design, where 'everything is an object' could actually start to work.
Of course, it's not perfect. Ruby has its problems, I'm willing to admit that:
Small and immature library collection
It's been shown to be slower than some other languages; however speed hasn't been an issue with me yet
Scope is broken in some cases; this is the biggest problem with Ruby and Matz admits it
Regardless, I wouldn't trade Ruby for anything. The only Perl I've done since learning Ruby is touchups of old CGI scripts. I highly suggest checking it out, and please persist even if you think the language looks too different from what you're used to (such as generally not using {} for blocks); I did and I'm very glad for doing so.
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.
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