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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."
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.
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.
Python is named after Monty Python, not a reptile. Fear off!
I agree with chromatic: you obviously don't know a thing about Perl. And I'm not just referring to the technical level here; you probably could code a simple program in Perl, but you'd be working against the language instead of *with* the language, because you ultimately don't grok either Perl or its principles or the community behind it.
:) You think you may have known Perl, but you really never did.
Go and play with PHP, kid.
quidquid latine dictum sit altum videtur.
It's amazing how quickly you can cast off Perl 6 when there's not even an alpha version of the interpreter yet (Pugs doesn't count) and when even the specs are not set in stone yet.
I think what you're exhibiting here is what I'd like to refer to as an "inverse God complex"
("inverse" is not the best word, admittedly, but I can't think of a better one) - you do a thought experiment where you try to do something (improve Perl), find that you can't do so in two minutes, and thus conclude that failure is *inevitable* (hence a God complex: if you can't do it, noone can) and that any *actual* attempt to do so must automatically fail as well.
Nevermind, of course, that lots of people, most of them much more intelligent than you and me, have worked on this problem for years; you're still able to not only dismiss their current work, but also all the work they have not done yet and conclude that they're not only doomed to fail, but in fact fail so catastrophically that Perl will die - that is already is dying.
Yes, definitely a God complex. Sorry.
quidquid latine dictum sit altum videtur.
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.
I want Perl 6 to be the community's rewrite of Perl and of the community.
And that's the chief reason why it's a directionless (or perhaps I should say omnidirectional) disaster that's not even close to production-ready after all these years. Programming language design by committee does not work.
Erlang.org: wow
Well, if you're browsing books at BN, don't pick up this one!
/ 0596100329.jpg
ftp://ftp.ora.com/pub/graphics/book_covers/hi-res
You don't need a special web scripting language to do web programming. That's the mode of thinking that brought us PHP. :-(
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.
Perl was never about raw power. Perl has always been about providing quick access to stuff you need often: hash tables, regular expressions, plowing through files, and so on. Haskell is a more powerful language on a fundamental level, but not on the day-to-day usability level. They each have their uses.