Slashdot Mirror

← Back to Stories (view on slashdot.org)

State of the Onion 11

Posted by Zonk on from the my-personal-favorite-is-french-onion-soup dept.

chromatic writes "Larry Wall's State of the Onion 11 address is now online. Every year, he describes the state of Perl and its community through metaphor and analogy. This year, Larry explored the history of scripting languages, from their dimly-lit beginnings to their glorious future. Along the way, he also describes several of the design principles invoked in the design of Perl 6. 'When I was a RSTS programmer on a PDP-11, I certainly treated BASIC as a scripting language, at least in terms of rapid prototyping and process control. I'm sure it warped my brain forever. Perl's statement modifiers are straight out of BASIC/PLUS. It even had some cute sigils on the ends of its variables to distinguish string and integer from floating point. But you could do extreme programming. In fact, I had a college buddy I did pair programming with. We took a compiler writing class together and studied all that fancy stuff from the dragon book.'"

12 of 278 comments (clear)

  1. Perl 6: The Language of the Future (... Forever) by joe_n_bloe · · Score: 5, Funny

    Every year Larry talks about what interesting things have been going on with Perl 6. These interesting things never include "release."

  2. Re:scripting by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1, Funny

    The difference between "very high" and "high," to me The difference to me is if i'm not very high I dont understand perl at all.
  3. Re:Perl 6: The Language of the Future (... Forever by rubycodez · · Score: 3, Funny

    and every year the design for Perl 6 becomes more and more contorted and ultra-complicated, basically taking every cool feature Larry sees in other languages and mashing them together into an incoherent Mulligan stew. If Perl is like "whale guts everywhere" then Perl 6 is like taking a whole Oceanarium of sea creatures and dropping them through the dual rotors of a crane copter 10,000 feet over Manhattan.

  4. In other news... by nycguy · · Score: 4, Funny

    Duke Nukem Forever team announces that they are reimplementing everything in Perl 6.

    1. Re:In other news... by Ignominious · · Score: 2, Funny

      FTA:

      "Then there's Duke Nukem Forever, a nice clean design. It has some issues, but in the long run Duke Nukem Forever might actually turn out to be a decent platform for running Perl 6 on. Pugs already has part of a backend for Duke Nukem Forever, though sadly that has suffered some bitrot in the last year. I think when the new Duke Nukem Forever engines come out we'll probably see renewed interest in a Duke Nukem Forever backend."

  5. BASIC/PLUS by Sloppy · · Score: 2, Funny

    Oh wow, BASIC/PLUS on a PDP-11 running RSTS. That's how I started too. And yet, I became a Python guy. ;-)

    --
    As copyright owner of this comment, I authorize everyone to defeat any technological measure which limits access to it.
    1. Re:BASIC/PLUS by Suzuran · · Score: 4, Funny

      My high school had a calculator policy of "You may bring any calculator you like to calculator-allowed tests."
      So one day I decided that my calculator was GLAXIA, my PDP-11/44 which ran RSTS/E (V8 or V7, I forget which...)
      I packed the whole thing on a cart; the system (Two BA11s), RA81 disk, and LA-120 teletype, and wheeled it into the classroom.
      The teacher asked me what it was - "It's my calculator." The look on his face was priceless.
      It was loud as hell, but the teacher allowed me to complete the test with it. I forget what I scored.
      Thereafter the calculator policy was changed to read
      "You may bring any calculator you like to calculator-allowed tests, provided it does not dim the lights when powered on."

      Old hardware rocks!

  6. Re:Perl 6: The Language of the Future (... Forever by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1, Funny

    Free sushi at your doorstep, for everybody!!!

    Tell me again how this is bad?

  7. Re:Yup... and he doesn't apologize for it by Nimey · · Score: 4, Funny

    So it's the computer-language equivalent of English?

    --
    Hail Eris, full of mischief...

    E pluribus sanguinem
  8. Re:Perl 6: The Language of the Future (... Forever by nuzak · · Score: 4, Funny

    > Thankfully, Perl 6 follows the same principle as previous Perls

    Except for actually existing.

    --
    Done with slashdot, done with nerds, getting a life.
  9. Re:Yup... and he doesn't apologize for it by theskipper · · Score: 3, Funny

    I once made a bet with a friend that some day we would see the terms "Perl 6" and "vibrating butt plug" in the same sentence.

    Kicking myself for not saying paragraph instead of sentence.

  10. Re:Perl 6: The Language of the Future (... Forever by sootman · · Score: 2, Funny

    Congratulations on the best mental image, evar. And yeah, it's taking a while: here he is talking about Perl 6 over five years ago. (Home of the famous "big knob" quote.)

    I wonder how this guy turned out: "Given this approach to learning Perl (just for a general working knowledge, maybe light usage,) is it really worth spending a lot of my time learning Perl now, or should I wait for the big Perl6 revision?" :-)

    --
    Dear Slashdot: next time you want to mess with the site, add a rich-text editor for comments.