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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."
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
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.
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.
Tequila: It's not just for breakfast anymore!
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.
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!
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
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).
Yes, there is a distro of linux with all of it's utilities written in perl. I don't know how valuable the project was, but it did show what could be done.
Would be fun to watch.
Harald
Holy crap, karma points are like crack. Seriously. I get one point and I start twitching. This cannot be healthy. . . can you buy karma?
heh, you obviously havent read any of his speeches before... :-)
Anyone there in person, who can report how he meant it?
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
PHP was originally a Perl application.
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.
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.
Here's how it goes.
Perl matters.
Larry Wall wrote Perl.
Larry does these State of the Onion things. They aren't news. But it is news that he has done one.
Since Perl matters and Larry wrote Perl, and many people are interested in reading the State of the Onion, the news therefore matters. Perhaps not to you. But it would only need to matter to one person in order to qualify for mattering.
So to clarify, the news here wasn't supposed to be what was contained within the presentation (though there is news in there if you open your mind to read in between the lines, which I think you have done) but instead that the presentation exists at all.
d. Taylor Singletary,
reality technician techra.el
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
I agree. Larry Wall is a good guy I'm sure, having given us Perl which is a fabulous tool and is free in all senses. But IMO his "State of the Onion" speeches are seldom if ever worth the effort. I framkly pass on reading them in full now, once I'm sure that a given one is the same as the rest.
"that's not encryption - it's a new perl script that I'm working on..." - from some Matrix parody
It wasn't incoherent.
I definitely got the idea.
Try thinking "outside the box" instead being like Rob Enderle.
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. :-)
Or is this a new thing?
How crude.
Now obviously, my bullet points are leaving out a lot of the information from the speech. One way of looking at things is that Larry is trying to convey a lot less concrete ideas through metaphors and imagery. Another way to look at it would be to consider it "spin" used to obscure the points. The other post that compared this to an SEC filing or a shareholder meeting has a point and if a corporation had to give news like this, there would probably be a lot of work trying to mitigate some of the harsher points that need to be made. In another point of view, this speech is supposed to be a rallying point for Perl developers, and as such is probably best to not just have the bare facts but also the opinions, and non-verbal points of view of the head of the perl development.
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!
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.
I am Jack9.
Everyone knows me.
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...
PHP was originally a Perl application.
It's kind of like when you get to the age where you're strong enough to beat up your dad!
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.
I agree with you, though I have to point out: There's really no way to determine whether
will return TRUE or FALSE without knowing the context, hence, in scalar context, will return TRUE in the "is not false" meaning of the word. However, I think it's also somewhat clear that:in thatthe feature set of Perl 6 is now stable, and yes,
there has been a delay, and yes,
Larry seems to have great confidence in the Perl development team, and yes,
his wife Gloria has veto power over the progress of the team toward the new Perl version.
Granted parsing the whole 4-page expression to evaluate such a simple expression is probably not that efficient. Maybe it's time to search CPAN for the Onion::WhatsItMean module.
Good luck to Larry with Perl 6 and his health.
Everything I've ever learned the hard way was based on a statistically invalid sample.
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?
...and the Perl 6 interpreter (parrot) is essentially complete...
Actually, parrot is a virtual machine meant to run interpreted languages. That's one of the cool things about it -- ruby and python could both be written to run on it, and then a parrot-to-machine-code compiler could be written, and I could finally compile ruby. Yay!
Compiler != interpreter
Oh yeah ... those vertical lines running down the side of the page make things so much more readable ... uh huh .. YSR ..
When you have to use tools like that just to be sure you're reading a source listing properly, the language is at fault - not the layout system.
So how come no one has come to rescue about my other comment - languages that require everything to be an object cause more overhead.
Face it - Python is crap. Period.
Been there, Done that, Sold the t-shirt to the next idiot in line