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State of the Onion 9
chromatic writes "Perl.com has just published Larry Wall's Ninth Annual State of the Onion address from OSCON 2005. In previous talks, he's used screensavers, music, and Unicode to explore Perl and open source. This year, he introduced the cast of characters in the Perl community in terms of spy movies and metaphors."
I'm disapointed it has nothing to do with The Onion - the satirical news site.
so here comes the punchline!
Any more onion jokes like that and I'll cry....
Screensavers, music, and Unicode... and photoshopping himself into James Bond photos.
Hm.
Well I guess that explains then what he's been doing instead of fricking finishing Perl 6!!!
Seriously man I have completed a college education and an entire generation of video game consoles have passed in the time that Perl 6 has been coming "Real Soon Now".
I'm serious, where is the talent in discussing OSS these days...
Arash
Arash Partow's Philosophy: Be a person who knows what they don't know, and not a person who doesn't know.
Pugs is a Perl 6 implementation. It is written in Haskell. I recently fooled around with it. What did I learn? Haskell is powerful. Perhaps even more powerful than Perl. Indeed, as a long time Perl programmer I think that I will soon be abandoning Perl in favor of Haskell. Its functional capabilities are extremely useful when writing software that needs to work (think automated verification and such). And that's just the beginning. If the performance of the compiled code of GHC can be improved somewhat, then we might see Haskell revolutionize programming. It will do what Perl did in the early 1990s: open up a whole new set of development opportunities that just plain did not exist.
Cyric Zndovzny at your service.
That was SO bad...
Show this to your friends and family that don't know what a real hacker is
Please, for the good of Humanity, vote Obama.
you read the summary and get the impression that President Larry Wall just gave the 9th State of the Union address and he loves pearls and onions.
Wow, an entire generation of video game consoles! What is that, six months?
Last couple "State of the Onion" addresses have been pretty bad - understandable, as Larry was getting increasingly ill, and Perl 5 was solidly in the hands of P5P and Perl 6 not yet pushing anything out.
Just started reading this one, and it is delighting me by not giving me the impression Larry is on his deathbed.
With how inaccessible and cryptic it was, you'd think he'd written it in [insert name of programming language here]... ba-dump-bump.
- Greg
Start a happiness pandemic
HAHAHAH LOOK I AM MAKING A JOKE ABOUT THEONION.COM ON THE INTERNET
Lameness filter nothing- Everyone thought about making this joke and it's redundant before anyone even makes it.
Six years if you're Sony, three years if you're Microsoft.
Holy fucking shit. Talk about a lack of sense of humor.
This particular insight into the perl community had me chuckling at my desk.
I'm not exactly sure where I fit in, or anyone else for that matter, but hey - Wu-Li's word is like gold.
I've got high hopes for Perl6 - time will tell whether it's been worth the wait... (No, I haven't read the Apocalypses - I'll learn the language when it's released.)
Perl can't continue to subsist solely on its established reputation of being the internet's 'glue'. An entire generation of developers have moved to other languages and frameworks. It looks more like Perl is going to end up as the next COBOL.
The world is moving on.
Don't forget that COBOL is still used today. It doesn't have the momentum it once had, of course. Perhaps you're right. The very same thing might happen to Perl. It won't be as widely used as it once was, but it will still be very useful to a lot of people. And it will be maintained, and there will be updates.
Cyric Zndovzny at your service.
Nobody was suggesting that Haskell is the first functional programming language. Of course not! But it has brought pure functional programming to the masses. Haskell's strong typing is a real plus.
Why is it taking over now? It's because we hit the limits of imperative languages years ago, and we're at the point of hitting the limits of object-oriented programming. That's why we're seeing applications that were traditionally implemented in C (such as a Perl implementation) being implemented using Haskell.
A language like Haskell allows more complex programs to be developed in less time, with fewer lines of code, and with enhanced stability and maintainability. While Perl was known for such things as well, Haskell offers native code compilation and the benefits of functional programming.
Indeed, we see that functional programming has had a massive impact on languages like Ruby and Python as of late. That's because the trend is moving towards techniques pioneered by languages like SML, and now made widely usable by Haskell.
I have looked at Curry, but I am not a fan of logical programming. I much prefer pure functional, or at worst an imperative, OO functional language such as O'Caml.
Cyric Zndovzny at your service.
Forcing people to work is not the open source way. If he wants to work on Perl 6, then he'll do so. If he'd rather play around with Photoshop, then he'll do that, too. To suggest that he should be forced into working on his open source project, a project that has been a godsend for hundreds of thousands of programmers over the last decade and a half, is just plain ignorant. That's just not how things work in the open source community. Contributions are valued and appreciated, but nobody is forced to contribute.
Cyric Zndovzny at your service.
How is this a troll really? Lots of folks *have* picked up Ruby in the time that Perl6 has been in development.
I still use perl all the time but it's fun to try new (to me) stuff like Ruby or Scheme - playful jabs are not the same as trolling.
The Chunky Bacon bit? It's a reference to Why's (Poignant) Guide to Ruby a funny, illustrated introduction to the language.
Kevin
Job security, that is. It was so easy to write "job security applications" in Perl that even PHBs caught on to it. The next web scripting language should be based on a very careful study of how obtuse the syntax can be before the cost of maintaining it will be enough to make IT managers cry "enough is enough!" and throw out the entire application. And yes, although I was not the actual maintenance programmer on a Perl app, I was close enough to those who were to understand what had happened, The nature of Perl is such that it was probably not intentional. I mean, it looked like the code was well organized, but no God help anybody who wanted to change it.
For all intensive purposes, "whom" is no longer a word. That begs the question, "who cares"?
...he can top "Perl6 will give you the big knob," I see no reason to tune in. :-)
Dear Slashdot: next time you want to mess with the site, add a rich-text editor for comments.
One of the goals of Perl 6 is to make non-trivial projects possible. That's good. The way it's being done is bad. Perl was once a lightweight, extremely flexible language. Now it's become a huge ugly monster. People wanted OO, so a nasty hack was bolted on top to allow some semblance of it. Now this nasty hack is being expanded. Sure, the code's different, but the basic form is the same. Kludge upon kludge upon kludge; I'd much rather have a nice, clean, pure language (and not one with loads of irritating whitespacethank you very much).
The same goes for the syntax. All the switching between $, @ and % is really irritating (ask a newbie how to get at the length of the keys array of a hash inside a hash, for example), and the changes proposed for 6 are just making this worse -- it seems that Larry, in his infinite wisdom, wants to prefix every data type with a different hard-to-type character. Perl was only designed for the three data types, and adding more is a mess.
Perl 6 is a complete rewrite, but it keeps all the mess which has accumulated over the previous versions. This is not good. Sure, my const int $var = 27; may look neat (in the same way that, say, Pascal does), but $var isn't entirely constant, or entirely an integer, it's just a hack which makes it sort of behave like one. It's like Ada all over again! The whole thing is an exercise in pseudo-computer science masturbation with little real purpose except to please the managers who dislike the one thing that makes Perl special.
On a similar note is regexes. I'm an avid fan of regular expressions simply because a nondeterministic finite automata is far more flexible than linear code. However, Larry must have been smoking that cheap $2 crack when he wrote this. Does he want Perl 6 to be flex or something?
I won't be going on to use 6. It's a nice idea, but it's completely unnecessary. It won't make large projects any easier to manage (the language is still, at heart, an almighty hack -- an impressive one, but still a hack). It won't make OO any cleaner. It won't make development any faster. I'd prefer to use a language which has always been pure synthesis of science and engineering, not some half-baked imposter.
Perl 6 will be nice, but I'm guessing it will be the end of Perl. It can't do what it wants to do whilst still being based upon a nasty mess. There are now other options, which provide all of Perl's power and none of the mess. Sorry, but *BSD^H^H^H^H Perl is dying.
...are in fact Christians. Just a fact. May make you want to use what they come up with more. Or maybe less. I just know I often have a choice when it comes to computer languages. And this could be a factor.
Transcend Humanity. Please.
Check this out: http://channel9.msdn.com/Showpost.aspx?postid=1146 80 and make sure you watch it to the end.
INSANE stuff. MSFT may have a winner with that one.
How is it a troll? I'll tell you how: Slashdot has moved on from Ruby on Rails and is now in prepetual masturbation mode over all things Google. Haven't you noticed?
"Who are in control, they are not in control of anything - they don't even control themselves!" - Glen Beck
I'm not Larry Wall, but let me answer that one for you:
You should not stick to Perl religiously but rather use the best tool for the job you need to get done. TIMTOWTDI, remember? If Python works for you, that's fine; if Python works better for you than Perl, then by all means, do use Python!
That's not to say that your decision to use Python is automatically right, but it's not automatically wrong, either, and without any knowledge whatsoever about the project you're working on, your personal preferences, your experiences and all that, how do you expect *us* (that is, the Perl community, although I can only speak for myself, of course) to tell you whether Perl or Python is the better tool for your job?
That's up to you to decide - we don't care what you use, although we may be interested in hearing why you didn't choose Perl.
quidquid latine dictum sit altum videtur.
Ruby is the next logical step from Perl, not Python. Seriously, Python sucks... it's so verbose you might as well just use C or C++, it'll be faster.
> (and not one with loads of irritating whitespacethank you very much).
If thats the only problem with Python (and until you are a bit more explicit, one can pretty much assume so), its gotta be a great language.
(Oh, BTW you are missing a whitespace there between the words "whitespace" and "thank")
Seriously... I once thought it was going to be something but not any more. The whole design is moronic.
Hey Larry! Dumbass! Everyone has moved on. Loads of people are using Python (although I don't know why, blech). People who know what they are doing and understand what made Perl so great are using Ruby... and PHP is out there too.
...and Perl 6 is coming out how "real soon now"?...
Yet another idea Wall is stealing from Ruby.
Was seen first in "Why's Poignant Guide to Ruby"
http://www.poignantguide.net/ruby/
Chunky Bacon !!!!
Am I the only one for whom the "next" completely fails at life and the internet? It's not just that, sometimes clicking on the page numbers does it too - sometimes. A firefox thing, or is it their fault?
Can someone check if this is a trool? I believe I have read this post before and the line Does he want Perl 6 to be flex or something? is making me deja vu again. I'm not saying this is a troll... just that it sure seems like it could be a copy-n-paste.
Your CPU is not doing anything else, at least do something.
I recently started learning perl and this is the first state of the onion that I've read. I think they went a little overboard with the props and whatnot, they should have focused more on information.
What, exactly, is wrong with "Spectre" ???
"Faith: Belief without evidence in what is told by one who speaks without knowledge, of things without parallel." - A.B.
Perl6
Actually, from the manic madcap release cycle, I'd say Python's already where it will be in 2013. They're coding the releases from 2035 about now, in order to stay ahead of the 2036 releases.
I was going to joke about how long I've been waiting for Duke Nukem Forever and TeamFortress 2... then I looked at the Perl Release History. My god, I've lost my virginity, been engaged 3 different times, went through highschool, went through college, lived in 6 different houses, had about 15 different cars, had about 20 different jobs, and travelled to another continent in since Perl 5 first appeared. And I thought IE7 was a long time in coming!
Some fun facts about 1993, the first appearance of Perl 5 (from Wikipedia - 1993):
In Moscow, George H. W. Bush and Boris Yeltsin sign the second Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty (START).
Washington State executes Westley Allan Dodd by hanging (the first legal hanging in America since 1965)
For the first time, Martin Luther King Jr. holiday is officially observed in all 50 American states.
Bill Clinton succeeds George H. W. Bush as President of the United States of America.
Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms agents raid the Branch Davidian compound in Waco, Texas with a warrant to arrest cult leader David Koresh on federal firearms violations. Four agents and five Davidians die in the raid and a 51-day standoff begins.
Rodney King testifies at the federal trial of four Los Angeles, California police officers accused of violating King's civil rights when they beat him during an arrest.
A bug in a program written by Richard Depew sends an article to 200 newsgroups simultaneously. The term spamming is coined by Joel Furr to describe the incident.
The World Wide Web was born at CERN.
War on Drugs: Colombian drug lord Pablo Escobar is gunned down in Medellín when police tries to arrest him.
And, of course, Perl 5 alpha first appears.
I8-D
I think Haskell has lots of potential, but it has some usability problems: its syntax is highly unfamiliar and error prone for mainstream programmers, and some concepts are just packaged badly (e.g., monads). Also, it's type system is probably more complex than people can handle.
A dynamically typed lazy functional programming language might be a better start towards popularizing functional programming.
Sorry, I neither get the state of the onion, nor do I get Perl. I'm just writing a lot of Perl code again, and while the coverage of the libraries is stellar, the language itself is a constant source of irritation for me.
I honestly don't see why they should suddenly take over and obsolete other programming
I'm not sure about "obsolete" thing, but functional programming strikes back -- that is for sure. Why I say that? First, because I've learned from pugs the same thing: Haskell is powerfull. And there are many other guys, so haskell bacame more popular, thanks to Pugs and Autrijus Tang, its leading developer. Second, new programming languages are adopting functional features: map, reduce, lambda in python for instance. There will be many of them in Perl6. Then Sun is developing new programming language Fortress, which is rather functional too. Why haskell? Haskell is pure and with age of parallel and grid computing at hand this is very important feature!
May Peace Prevail On Earth
in the future, for that is where you and I are going to spend the rest of our lives. And remember, my friends, future events such as these will affect you in the future.
"Can your heart stand the shock about Perl 6 from Outer Space?"
... or was it onion?
...
At first read, I was pretty sure the story title referred to G.W.Bush's speech for next year.
Anyway, here's the summary either way:
The world is just a great big onion
& pain & fear are the spices that make you cry
Anyone know how to make a Perl haiku out of that song? One that creates a spy movie plot that's actually less saddening than reality?
Better still, lets hack a transformation script that takes Larry Wall's article and turns it into a candidate speech for Bush to (try to) recite?
All the basic ingredients are there. Dangerous mushrooms, references to Evil Contries, Mugshots with stats (just apply s/spy/terrorist/g ). I've got a feeling the resemblance between Larry's article and the final version of Bush's speech will be amazing...
The Hacker's Guide To The Kernel: Don't panic()!
The next Cobol is Java!
Sad so sad.
PS mom wants to know when she can get her basement back.
Am I the only one to think Pixie was kinda cute, then go back to her card and realise she's supposed to be 14? Curse you Larry Wall, curse you!
Well, one problem which the "choose the best tool for the job" paradigm is that when you are working at a company that needs to consider supporting your applications after you are gone, sometimes the 'right tool for the job' is to choose from a very small list of platforms that the company is dedicated to supporting.
When I fist starting working, I had to fight tooth and nail to convince the suits to allow me to use perl at all. Dispite the fact that perl was the best tool for the job at the time, they'd rather me jump through hoops to use the platform they had invested in (Oracle 7 and plsql) then have to support another platform. It's about money and it's about being able to meet your end user support agreements.
So it not aways easy to say, "Let's use python for this and perl for that."
Now that I work at a consulting company we have more flexibility, since we typically do one off projects for clients that then support the application themselves afterward. So in that case I can actually choose the platform that seems fastest and easiest to use for the job at hand. If it's a small content management system I will use python with Plone, since I have a lot of developers that have skills in Zope. But often I use Perl for more custom stuff, since that is the language I know best.
I guess it depends on the company you are in.
Peace, or Not?
If you want good i18n, use Python. Ruby will never support Unicode, because Matz is Japanese and the Japanese are on a holy war against Unicode or something.
Please, for the good of Humanity, vote Obama.
I'm just hoping that Perl 6 comes with a brand new edition of Learning Perl, complete with Sponsorship from Hooters. Randle Shwartz clearly knows his circular arrays. I'd love to hear his State of the Onions address, complete with gimp'ed role-models.