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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.
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.
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.
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.
Oh, I didn't mean to imply that you said that Haskell was the first functional language - certainly not. I merely wanted to point out that Haskell isn't new, so if a revolution hasn't happened yet, why should it happen now?
I've met many people, especially at the university, who believed that functional languages were the holy grail of programming and that they would be taking over the (computer) world Real Soon Now(tm). But it's never happened, and nowadays, I believe that these people are just out of touch with reality.
Let's face it - the IT industry is just like any other industry, especially in one regard: things usually happen by evolution rather than revolution. Traits of functional programming languages will certainly find their way into the "mainstream" (and the "mainstream" languages), but nobody'll decide to just throw out all existing code all of a sudden and reinvent everything from the ground up in a new language - no matter how good that language is or, more important, how much better it is than the existing languages. Even object-oriented programming is really an extension of the imperative programming paradigm, not a replacement.
Paradigm shifts do occur, but they occur over time, and it's a smooth transition, not an abrupt one. Statements like "we've hit the limits of imperative languages" may sound cool, but they ultimately don't mean anything - the limits are changing. Boundaries *can* be pushed, and *that* is something that is *especially* true in the computer industry in general and the software industry in particular.
I won't deny that I'm not a fan of functional programming languages myself, of course. Personally, I think they're rather unnatural; it may be easier to model their semantics mathematically (and the mathematical models will be more "natural", too), but I also think that the step-by-step approach of imperative languages is more natural for the human mind - it's how we do things, and that's probably why imperative languages took off when functional languages didn't (and for the record, both functional and imperative programming language started at the same time, in the mid-50s, and the theoretical foundations, in the form of Turing machines and lambda calculus, also popped up at about the same time).
Nevertheless, I do realise that functional programming languages have some very interesting and useful features, and I'm certain that these will be incorporated into existing languages (or new languages based on existing ones, in the sense that Java is a new language based on C, for example) eventually - and that's a good thing. Pure functional programming, however, will (IMO!) always remain a specialised niche for certain, mostly mathematical (that is, theoretical) problems that naturally lend themselves to being modelled in functional ways.
quidquid latine dictum sit altum videtur.
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"?
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.