Larry Wall Talks Perl, Culture, and Community

LostDiver writes "Computerworld Australia caught up recently with Larry Wall of Patch and Perl fame. He talks about the development of Perl as 'scratching an itch,' a release date for Perl 6 (Christmas day, year unknown) and beauty versus practicality. Computerworld also has some more information on the upcoming Perl 6. A while back they interviewed Bjarne Stroustrup of C++ fame as well." jamie pointed out a interesting, related video of a presentation by Clay Shirky from last year's Supernova conference in which he discusses why the Perl community (or any web community) drives progress and innovation.

Comments

perl is irrelevant

[larry bagina]

not irrelevant in the sense that it's dead, but irrelevant in the sense that it's a has-been. Ruby, Python, and PHP have overtaken it. Consider:

In Perl 6, ``->'' is being replaced by ``.''. And ``.'' is being replaced by ``_''. Why? Because everybody else (Python, Java, C#, etc) uses ``.'' to dereference.

Perl is no longer a leader, it's a follower. Monkey See, Monkey. That's the sort of cargo cult programming you'd expect from PHP.

Vista was version 6, too. Maybe Perl 7 will be better.