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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.
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".
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.
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.
so here comes the punchline!
WHACK! Anonymous Coward slaps Oxodeaddead around the head a bit with a large Perl book! There that will teach you to insult Perl you farty pants VB coder!
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
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.
You've obviously never heard Larry Wall do one of these.
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.
Now, now, just because Ruby's block syntax looks like VB's doesn't mean it deserves to be compared to VB...
Please, for the good of Humanity, vote Obama.
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.
Python is named after Monty Python, not a reptile. Fear off!
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.
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.
> (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")
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?
Your post seems oddly familiar...
Perl 6 is a mistake
Perl 6 is a mistake
Perl 6 is a mistake
This is really getting to be a bit tiresome.
BTW, moderators, please stop modding this troll up over and over every time Perl comes up.
Hyperbole is the worst thing ever.
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
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