Slashdot Mirror
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".
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.
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.
Functional programming has been around for a long, long time, actually, but it has never revolutionised programming, so I'm not sure why Haskell should do it now - it's been around for almost 20 years already, too.
Not that functional languages don't have their merits, of course, but I honestly don't see why they should suddenly take over and obsolete other programming paradigms now.
That being said, have you taken a look at Curry? It's a language that combines functional and logical programming (à la Prolog) - definitely rather cool.
quidquid latine dictum sit altum videtur.
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.
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.