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Larry Wall on Perl 6
Nate writes "Linux Format magazine has an interview with Larry Wall, the eccentric linguist and coder behind Perl. Larry discusses some of the new Perl 6 features ready to rock the world, and if you're not planning to move from Perl 5.8, he has a few musings on that too."
Larry Wall (b. September 27, 1954), programmer, linguist, author, is most widely known for his creation of the Perl programming language in 1987. Wall earned his bachelor's degree from Seattle Pacific University in 1976.
Wall is the author of the rn Usenet software and the nearly universally used patch. He has won the International Obfuscated C Code Contest twice and was the recipient of the first Free Software Foundation's award for the Advancement of Free Software in 1998.
Beyond his technical skills, Wall is known for his wit and often ironic sense of humor, which he displays in the comments to his source code or on Usenet. For example: "We all agree on the necessity of compromise. We just can't agree on when it's necessary to compromise."
Larry Wall is a trained linguist, and has used this training in the design of Perl. He is the co-author of Programming Perl (often referred to as the Camel Book), which is the definitive resource for Perl programmers. He has edited the Perl Cookbook. His books were published by O'Reilly.
Wall's Christian faith has informed some of the terminology of Perl, such as the name itself, a biblical reference to the "Pearl of great price" (Matthew 13:46). Similar references are the function names bless and confess and the organization of his talks into categories such as apocalypse and exegesis. Wall has also alluded to his faith when he has spoken at conferences, including a rather straightforward statement of his beliefs at the August, 1997 Perl Conference and a discussion of Pilgrim's Progress at the YAPC (Yet Another Perl Conference) in June, 2000.
Wall continues to oversee further development of Perl and serves as the Benevolent Dictator for Life of the Perl project. His role in Perl is best conveyed by the so-called 2 Rules, taken from the official Perl documentation:
1. Larry is always by definition right about how Perl should behave. This means he has final veto power on the core functionality.
2. Larry is allowed to change his mind about any matter at a later date,regardless of whether he previously invoked Rule 1.
Got that? Larry is always right, even when he was wrong.
Larry's personal home page
Larry Wall wiki quotes
"If anyone needs me, I'm in the angry dome."
Unfortunately perl has a great deal of semantic nastiness too. A lot of it relates to the magic builtin variables like $! or $1, $2, $3. My favourite is http://rt.perl.org/rt3/Ticket/Display.html?id=2314 0>.
-- Ed Avis ed@membled.com
Nevertheless, there were many ways in which Perl 5 was running into its limits, and these were both syntactic limits and semantic limits.
This is so misguided. I take this to mean that Perl6 syntax will be even more of a carnival of confusion than Perl5. Will Perl6 replace sendmail.cf as the most vile grammer yet devised? Maybe, but more likely it is so complex that it will never be released. Can you say Hurd?
an ill wind that blows no good