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."

Comments

Ridiculous

[The Bungi]

I'm sorry, but a lot of people are waiting for Perl6 and he has photoshopped James Bond, witty dialogue about nuclear weapons and faux videogame graphics. Parrot has been in alpha for what, 5 years now?

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.

Forced labour is not the open source way.

[CyricZ]

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.

Re:Questions for Larry

[slavemowgli]

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.

Re:Screensavers, music, and Unicode?

[hobuddy]

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.

Re:Perl Had Too Much Security

[stesch]

You don't need a special web scripting language to do web programming. That's the mode of thinking that brought us PHP. :-(