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

Perl 5x is great, Ruby 1.8x is greater. P6 v R2?

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

Re:Incoherent Rant

[Pharmboy]

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.

Python is a reality

[tabo_peru]

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.

Re:Python is a reality

[Anonymous Coward]

yeah, and.... what that has to do with perl?
next you know somebody is going to say they do serious work with java or ada. but what does that have to do with the article?

Re:Python is a reality

[Waffle Iron]

Why not use that if everything being an object, and clean and clear syntax, are so revolutionary?

One reason is the Goldilocks factor:

Lisp: too many parentheses
Smalltalk: not enough parentheses
Python: just right

Smalltalk: too many colons
Lisp: not enough colons
Python: just right

Larry:

[Tei]

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.

video of the speech?

[Harald Paulsen]

Would be fun to watch.

Re:Incoherent Rant

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

heh, you obviously havent read any of his speeches before... :-)

Tom Christiansen

[yow2000]

Is he having a go at his "good friend" Tom Christiansen"? It seems like it he's making a joke of it, but then switches back to serious. Not very nice.

Anyone there in person, who can report how he meant it?

My good friend Tom Christiansen, who does have ADHD, once said jokingly that I have "task-switching deficit" disorder. He's probably right on that. Certainly I seem to be stuck on this Perl thing. I've been stuck there for more than 15 years now. People think I make these long mental leaps all the time, but they're all in the scope of this one picture. In my mind, everything relates to Perl, one way or another. You'll notice this screensaver never jumps off the screen. Another way to view this screensaver is that the long jumps are indicative of the ability to stay on task a long time. In that view, if you have attention deficit disorder, your thinking looks more like this, because you're changing directions faster than you want to.

[Wander]

People with ADHD have many endearing qualities, spontaneity not the least of them. But it is a disability, and the ADHD approach only gets you so far. More to the point, it tends to get you back where you were. Here we see a screensaver based on a random walk. It's actually rather stultifying if you watch it long enough. It's been shown mathematically that a random walk will eventually return to the place it started if you wait long enough.

Now, just because I say a random walk is stultifying to watch, please don't take that to mean that ADHD people are stultifying to watch. Quite the opposite, in fact. I'm just using these screensavers as talking points, as metaphors of life, but some of my metaphors limp. As we get older we realize that everyone has disabilities. That seems to be true of metaphors as well. They all limp. Except for the ones that are dead. Anyway, please don't anyone take offense at my free associations. Even if they're true.

You know how people are sometimes rude on Usenet or on a mailing list. Sometimes they'll write something that can only be taken as a deadly insult, and then they have the unmitigated gall to put a smiley face on it, as if that makes it all right. It doesn't, you know. Nevertheless, if I insult you with a deadly insult in this talk, please put one of those little smileys after it. :-)

Anyway, where was I. Oh, yes, random walks. And the fact that they're kind of stultifying to watch.

VM: The Way to Go?

[RAMMS EIN]

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.

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 .NET. I am really
a bit doubtful about whether Parrot is a wise choice for Perl, but I must admit I have not been following things very closely.

Re:VM: The Way to Go?

[Anonymous Coward]

Perl using the virtual machine isn't going to be the advantage. I think the real advantage is that other languages will SHARE the virtual machine. Think about line after line of old basic code. You'll be able to share modules between languages, and even better be able to extend and maintain code which may not neccesarily be in the same langage. Think of an old BASIC app that works but is aging and not well documented. Running this through Parrot should allow you to write some additional modules to extend this application in something like Python.

Re:Python is crap

[afd8856]

Usualy python editors have some "tabify region" command, where it takes whitespace and replaces it with tabs.

Re:Perl, it's the new COBOL

[The Unabageler]

Java is a dead end language. No evolution. Like COBOL.
COBOL is a dead end language. No evolution. Like Sanscrit.
Perl evolves. It will stay alive forever.

right tool for the job? Since when is duct tape not the right tool for any job? WTF kind of geek are you? ;-)

for the record, I write perl for a living, and due to the results of my last project, the company that used to be "java all the way, perl is on the way out" has now done a 180. It CAN be done right. But like any language, computer or human, most people will mangle the hell out of it. Like ebonics.