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Linux Journal interviews Larry Wall

Posted by CmdrTaco on from the stuff-to-read dept.

jbc writes "Linux Journal's cover story for May was an interview with Larry Wall, which is now online. Some good stuff on the future of Perl, whether or not Open Source is a passing fad, and why Activestate is not necessarily evil. "

4 of 75 comments (clear)

  1. Larry Wall is Cool by Elias+Ross · · Score: 3

    I think the geek and coder community needs to make a calendar of all the heros of open source, open standards, the internet, etc. Larry Wall would have to be, Mr. June or July or something.

    We could have Larry, Linus, the Samba Team, etc. A new face every month. And a couple good quotes to go along with them...

  2. Very good article... by vinh · · Score: 4
    I found this article very interesting, even if you're just a "Sunday" Perl programmer (like me) :)

    For those who have read _The design and evolution of C++_ by Stroustroupp (sp??) it is interesting to note that Perl and C++ share some design philosophies. Like "the user is always right" school of thought. Maybe that's why both of these languages are popular?

    Anyway, you gotta admit larry Wall has a pretty big vocabulary:
    • ...three chief virtues of a programmer: Laziness, Impatience and Hubris...
    • ...Third, I look for projects that franchise the disenfranchised...
    • ...explicitly designed to be postmodern...
    • ...free-form syntax...
    • ..I must have a conjunctive rather than a disjunctive brain...

    and etc. etc... I sure would have got higher scores in school had I used words like that! :)

  3. Larry is Cool by gavinhall · · Score: 3

    Posted by d106ene5:

    I don't know how else to say it - his presentations at conferences are so offbeat, his interviews always entertaining.

    Of course, perl is offbeat and entertaining. Its bizarre and obscure at times, but anyone who can write it with skill usually swears by it.

  4. The NSA does use perl. by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 3

    I used to work for the NSA. We used Perl for scripting tasks etc. But most of our filters were done in C. When i was in Menwith Hill, we had to do Sparc Assembly as well, you should now how hard it is to write software that has to monitor gigs per seconds, you have to tune your systems to perfection.