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State of the Onion 9

Posted by CowboyNeal on from the straight-from-the-camel's-mouth dept.

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."

7 of 174 comments (clear)

  1. Screensavers, music, and Unicode? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Interesting

    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".

    1. Re:Screensavers, music, and Unicode? by Nataku564 · · Score: 3, Interesting

      What, you dont like objects?

      Quite frankly, a cleaned up object model is just what perl needs. Well, in addition to some standardized handling of threads, and some other features that most OO languages have.

      Perl isn't Ruby. Perl isn't Python. Perl isn't PHP. Perl is its own animal/vegetable/mineral. It may not be your cup of tea, which is quite obvious, but thats a Good Thing. It means that Perl isn't giving into peer pressure from other programming languages and simply becoming a weak amalgam of language X/Y/Z with a few more dollar signs strewn about.

      I like Perl. It truly makes coding a fun event for me. I am not bound by many of the restrictions of other languages, unless I want to be. It allows me to write a program in a form that more closely resembles the ideas and designs I have in my head than any other language I have tried.

      Go Perl.

    2. Re:Screensavers, music, and Unicode? by Hosiah · · Score: 3, Interesting
      in the time that Perl 6 has been coming "Real Soon Now".

      I know replys that begin "you should be thankful, imagine if..." suck, but:

      Be a Python programmer for awhile and see the *other* extreme: a programming language that never stops being a moving target! Wrote a program in Python yesterday? It's outdated, they no longer use that function, you gotta re-code it. Should you do it today? Nahhh, it's nearly five o'clock, better wait for tomorrow's edition of Python so we get a whole day's use out of it.

      Let's make a deal, six months out of the year, we swap Larry for Guido.

  2. What I've learned from Pugs. by CyricZ · · Score: 3, Interesting

    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.
  3. An entire generation of video game consoles. by Anon.Pedant · · Score: 3, Interesting

    Wow, an entire generation of video game consoles! What is that, six months?

  4. Finally! by erikharrison · · Score: 3, Interesting

    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.

  5. Perl Had Too Much Security by istartedi · · Score: 3, Interesting

    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"?