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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."
Is perl used for anything besides system administration tasks? I mean, no one tries to write serious software with it, right?
fp
pervy nah!
I run Windows XP pro and one day I discovered that the task manager doesn't show the process names anymore! In the View -> Select Columns menu, the Image Name is also locked.
What the hell is going on? Has my computer been hacked?
Thnx!
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.
Internal Server Error
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.
Come on, this is not serious.
If that's the state of perl, then perl is fucked. Larry shows no interest for the langage he created, nor for the audience.
It looks like an embarassing joke. Sad.
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?
I skimmed through the article, and like Perl, I couldnt understand what he was saying, it probably meant well, I guess. And with Perl-6, the name may have some hidden meaning, 2006 release.
---- Berlin Brown http://www.newspiritcompany.
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.
1) Why would you use any other language?
2) WTF is he talking about?
Through the use of various screensavers
I hear that after the conference he was attacked by several members of ScreenPeace and PETS (People for Ethical Treatment of Screensavers).
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.
-Woof woof woof!
George Bush's State of the Union speech.
Yeah, once Ruby has at least UTF-8 everywhere, I'll be all over it.
GCHQ Quantum Insert installed. If only our tongues were made of glass, how much more careful we would be when we speak
This article went nowhere.
I hear that after the conference he was attacked by several members of ScreenPeace and PETS (People for Ethical Treatment of Screensavers).
Absolutely miserable. You FUCKING fail it.
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).
Would be fun to watch.
Harald
His speech probably makes more sense if heard and not read, but either way, when he talks about adhd and aspergers, it's clear that he is serious that he has it. It reads as very adhd and almost schizophrenic.
Anyone there in person, who can report how he meant it?
Not that much about Perl 6, but Wall is certainly a brilliant geek-stand-up-comedian!
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
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.
.NET. I am really
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
a bit doubtful about whether Parrot is a wise choice for Perl, but I must admit I have not been following things very closely.
Please correct me if I got my facts wrong.
shows that you can implement the Unix command line utilities in Perl and they run twice as slow.
For those that don't know of Damian Conway, he is one hell of way out programmer (had to be an Aussie!):
Lingua::Romana::Perligata -- Perl for the XXI-imum Century
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
What horny Slashdotters are keen on is your daughter.
... "- intentional blankness -" -- were we expected?
Hmmm
Use ISO 8601 dates [YYYY-MM-DD]
Or is this a new thing?
Yeah it's really fun when someone has indented four or five structures in and I'm looking at a hardcopy print and have to suffer through wrapped around lines that just seem to go on and on and it's really a blast to try and see which line goes with which indent.
If a print layout system cannot handle the particular method of layout used by a language, the fault lies with the layout system, not with the language.
Indent-blocked languages need to be set in print with the help of graphic elements like vertical alignment lines or block highlighting. When that isn't done and the result causes confusion, then blame the publishers or even the book author. Blaming the language is silly.
Larry is not an insensitive clod.
hah, this is called 'irony'--how does it feel?
perhaps you Perl-loving trolls out there will have more restraint in the future, when YOU think an article isn't news!
Or at least, that's how the sheep of society label them.
Slashdot is 95% sheep.
Strange and indecipherable, but somehow you find that you like it.
That was a truly beautiful speach, technically and poetically. Would have given even Cicero a run for the money.
--
All rites reversed 2010
And here I was thinking, "How the heck did Larry Wall come to be associated with The Onion? And does this mean that maybe they'll bring back their free archives?"
p
In Korea, long hair is for old people!
When do we get Perl 6? Do we think it will be sometime in 2006? 2007?
How much longer before the current work on Parrot and Ponie bear fruit that regular people can use?
I want to start playing with the OO stuff from Apocalypse 12. I want it NOW!
It seems like no one's talking about this... Are there any dates at all?
It seems like Larry's talk had no content becuase everything that's going on now is too abstract and behind the scenes.
The 5.8 and 5.9 codelines are moving along, Perl 6 is still in design/pre-alpha, and that's all for now. Later...
I was rather disturbed to observe stains on Heidi's shirt in the photo 5...
I must say that for a 14-year old geek minx she gave me an damn incredible blow-job but she couldn't swallow all of my mighty load.
You can see me in the background, by the way.
It's being used at NASA, NOAA, Intel (check out the next Intel Compilers Evaluation CD [I think they call it the developer's CD now] - it's got Ruby on it ;-). There's the Rails Web app framework that's getting rave reviews.
Lots of cool stuff going on in the Ruby-world now.
You have to install the xscreensaver software. It should include an app called 'xscreensaver-demo', which if you run, will let you select and view the slides he names.
That's for Linux and Unix - not sure how you can easily do the same on other OSes.
Smalltalk implementations are just not as well integrated with the Unix environment as Ruby is. They require this huge, language-specific, monolithic environment around them, practically an OS into itself. The only such language that's really been successful is Java.
Are you adequate?
Does anybody have the article text?