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

video of the speech?

[Harald Paulsen]

Would be fun to watch.

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

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.