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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."
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).
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?
Would be fun to watch.
Harald
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
PHP was originally a Perl application.
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 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
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.
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.
I was at the OsCon '04 Keynotes. Larry Wall's State of The Onion Address was entertaining, if not a bit hard to follow at times. When he was discussing ADHD it seemed as though he was mostly using it to contrast his "opposite" problem, and make the point that any kind of singular personality (strictly ADHD bounciness, or strictly task-switching deficiency) was a bad thing, or at least not as productive as a good balance.
In his talk about Tom Christiansen his tone seemed to be half humour/half endearing. I'd say there's no ill will between them, or between Larry Wall and people who have ADHD in general.
If you run xscreensaver -demo and follow along you might get a bit clearer picture of what he wanted, but then again maybe not. Half the time it seemed like he was running the wrong screen saver, or the screen saver he chose didn't appear to apply to his topic. Then again, at other times (like where he demonstrates how his mind solves puzzles) it was very funny and appropriate.
OT: What I really want to see is the "Life, the Universe, and Everything" keynote transcription, it was the last one that night. In it I saw perl6 extensions used to create variables with dual values, and Conway's Game of Life written in perl...in Klingon! If anyone has a link to this program, or can remember the CPAN::Klingon module's name it'd be great.
It was great being at the State of the Onion address in person, but from reading last year's address, I came away with the opinion that Larry Wall is a better author than orator, and his language can be mildly stilted at times. But what more could be expected from a hacker?
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.