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."

Comments

Re:Python is a reality

[Uber Banker]

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?

Re:Perl, it's the new COBOL

[chromatic]

I think it's a false dilemma that you can either use Perl flexibly or write maintainable code. Surely a flexible language allows you to choose a coding approach that fits your team!

Regardless, I fail to see how agreeing on minutiae such as brace placement and indentation will make Perl inflexible. I don't understand on how agreeing to write short subroutines, use a consistent and descriptive naming scheme, and build a comprehensive test suite is unperlish.

In short, I think if your team can agree on a coding style, you can solve the maintainability program.

If you can't agree on a coding style, it doesn't matter which language you choose.