Slashdot Mirror
State of the Onion 11
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.'"
I really wish the term "scripting language" would die. Can't we just call them "very high level" languages, instead? Isn't that sufficient to distinguish the Perls, Pythons, and Rubys of the world from the "high level" languages like C and C++? It is perfectly possible to compile Python programs, for example, to a pyc binary. They aren't any more "scripts" than a.out. The difference between "very high" and "high," to me, is the fact that dynamic datastructures (lists, hashes) are native, so programmers don't have to worry about mundane memory address and pointer nonsense.
A slashdotter who didn't build his own computer is like a Jedi who didn't build his own lightsaber.
Every year Larry talks about what interesting things have been going on with Perl 6. These interesting things never include "release."
The Perl 6 community is more focused on getting it right than getting it into the marketplace ASAP. While this is frustrating for many -- it seems like every other day, there's a Perl 6 feature I want to use in my Perl 5 program -- it has contributed positively to the development of Perl 5 and Perl 6 alike. Perl 6 is painstakingly designed and planned as truly a next-generation dynamic language, and as features are completed, they often spill down into Perl 5. (See the perldelta for v5.10, out very soon, for some good examples.)
Unless someone is willing to finance full-time development on Perl 6, this is the best we get. I think it's pretty good.
Cretin - a powerful and flexible CD reencoder
Duke Nukem Forever team announces that they are reimplementing everything in Perl 6.
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!
Can we please stop bashing C++ memory management? I write C++ for a living, yet very rarely use what the critics typically call "manual memory management". Either it's really not that hard to do things in better ways, or I guess I must be a superhuman programmer, because according to all the checking software, I haven't introduced a memory leak since... no, actually, I've never introduced one in as long as I've worked here. If you want to talk about the advantages of garbage collection, knock yourselves out, but please stop treating C++ and C as if they're the same in terms of memory management. They are different worlds.
In any case, garbage collection is far from the biggest benefit of using a scripting language (or whatever we want to call them) over something lower level. As others are pointing out, the more important properties exhibited by most of the modern scripting languages that make them "high level" include first class data structures, first class functions, and dynamic typing.
If you disagree, post your argument. (-1, Overrated) isn't your personal censorship tool for views you don't like.
I guess I really don't get the purpose of the essay. I think the purpose of the essay might be to be a rambling short history of "scripting" languages, and a rundown of various language design choices with "Perl 6 will have [x]" statements.
It was also (IMO) a damn fine read, with lots of intriguing rhetorical flourishes (I also learned a little C. [...] That's because a little C is all there is) and thought-provoking concepts, like how most human languages can express anything, but they differ in what you MUST express.
I think most people have a rough idea where Perl is now (present, though likely slipping as a % of interesting code being written) and where it's going (a guess about how the new perl 6 would be received when it finally shows up) As to TMTOWTDI, I've concluded TOABWTDI (There's Often A Better Way To Do It). Better than Perl, or in general?
If the latter, well sure... there will almost be another way that is better in some subset of the parameters you could use to measure "Betterness". One tradeoff you always have to make is how much time and conceptual effort do you put into optimizing that...
SO YOU'RE GOING TO DIE: The Comic for Dealing with Death
> Thankfully, Perl 6 follows the same principle as previous Perls
Except for actually existing.
Done with slashdot, done with nerds, getting a life.