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Interviews: Ask Perl Creator Larry Wall a Question
Larry Wall created the Perl programming language (as well as the Unix utility patch, and the Usenet client rn ). This Christmas saw the release of Perl 6 -- a "sister" language to the original Perl -- that's also free and open source, after 15 years of development. Now Larry has agreed to give some of his time to answer your questions (joking that "I doubt my remarks will be quite as controversial as, say, Donald Trump's, but I suspect I could say an interesting thing or two...")
Larry also gave Slashdot's very first interview back in 2002 -- so it's high time we had him back for more heartfelt and entertaining insights. Ask as many questions as you'd like, but please, one per comment. (And feel free to also leave your suggestions for who Slashdot should interview next.) We'll pick the very best questions -- and forward them on to Larry Wall himself.
Larry also gave Slashdot's very first interview back in 2002 -- so it's high time we had him back for more heartfelt and entertaining insights. Ask as many questions as you'd like, but please, one per comment. (And feel free to also leave your suggestions for who Slashdot should interview next.) We'll pick the very best questions -- and forward them on to Larry Wall himself.
Why do you think so few people have adopted Perl as their language of choice?
Perl used to be central to so many things (the 'glue' language for the internet), but seems to be slowly falling out of use in deference to javascript, java, python, vbscript/powershell, etc. It's the language I used in my first job as a system administrator (back around the time you gave your first interview), and I loved it.
With so many years between the announcement of Perl 6 and it's completion, many people moved on to other solutions or technologies. Perl 6 is here now, but why should I use it?
"Murphy was an optimist" - O'Toole's commentary on Murphy's Law
Why is the syntax of perl so bad? It lends itself to scripts that even the authors can't understand after a week or two.
Perl and "Rizla fine rolling papers" should have a common tag line :
It's what you make of it
Yeah, right. Just as C lends itself to it, just look at IOCCC.
You can write shitty perl code, but you can also write beautiful code that is easy to read and maintain since perl is very high level and you don't need to bog down into technical details to solve everyday stuff. Just describe your algorithm and let modules do the heavy lifting (don't reinvent the wheel).
Just because a sysadmin hacks together a five line perl script to fix an acute problem, doesn't mean that all perl code is shitty.