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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."
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".
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.
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.
You've obviously never heard Larry Wall do one of these.
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.
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"?
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?