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Larry Wall's State of the Onion 8
Posted by
michael
on Sat Aug 21, 2004 07:22 AM
from the layered-and-makes-you-cry dept.
from the layered-and-makes-you-cry dept.
zachlipton writes "Perl.com has posted Larry Wall's State of the Onion talk from this year's Open Source Convention and The Perl Conference. Through the use of various screensavers, Wall talks a bit about himself, and of course, Perl and Perl 6."
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Perl 5x is great, Ruby 1.8x is greater. P6 v R2? (Score:2, Interesting)
Would be interesting to see if parrot successfully unites various scripting languages.
Python is a reality (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:Python is a reality (Score:2, Informative)
Re:Python is a reality (Score:5, Insightful)
Parent
Re:Python is a reality (Score:5, Interesting)
One reason is the Goldilocks factor:
Lisp: too many parentheses
Smalltalk: not enough parentheses
Python: just right
Smalltalk: too many colons
Lisp: not enough colons
Python: just right
Parent
Re:Python is a reality (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:Python is crap (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:Python is crap (Score:2)
Re:Python is crap (Score:2, Informative)
Re:Python is a reality (Score:2, Insightful)
Of course, it's not perfect. Ruby has its problems, I'm willin
Re:Python is a reality (Score:4, Informative)
That's a bit unfair; Ruby's libraries tend to be of high quality, and they cover a fairly respectable amount of ground even if they are a little more limited in numbers. Two or three excellent implementations is better than two or three reasonable ones and a thousand crappy ones.
Slower how? Certainly development time wise Ruby is one of the fastest languages on the planet; when it comes to runtime performance it's about on par with PHP. Finding hotspots isn't difficult with the various profiling, benchmarking and testing modules about, and you'll struggle to find a language where writing a C extension to optimize out a hotspot is so easy.
Do you have a ruby-talk reference?
Parent
Re:Perl 5x is great, Ruby 1.8x is greater. P6 v R2 (Score:2)
The current state of Perl: (Score:2, Funny)
Re:The current state of Perl: (Score:4, Funny)
No worries, here's a link to the real state of the Onion [theonion.org] for you.
Parent
Easily his best (Score:3, Insightful)
Those who are use to wit understand it to be along the lines of Garrison Kellior. I wonder if anyone would ever have discovered him had he not written a stepping stone lanuage like Perl.
Best Quote:
Can you begin to see why I have a special mental relationship with these screensavers? Maybe I'm a little bit crazy, but I can't decide if it's psychotic or neurotic. You know the difference, don't you? A psychotic thinks that 2 + 2 = 5. A neurotic knows that 2 + 2 = 4, but it makes him nervous.
He is valuable, but he's more Salon.com instead of Perl.com, ya know what I mean?
Re:Easily his best (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:Easily his best (Score:2, Informative)
RIP, Pierre Desproges.
Re:Easily his best (Score:2)
2+2=5, but only for extremely large values of 2.
(thank you TG)
I wish more people did this.. (Score:5, Insightful)
Or, perhaps they do, and I've missed it. Examples.. Linux could do an annual State of Linux, Bill Gates could do an annual State of Microsoft.. People I'd particularly like to see do an annual address on what they're up to would be Scott McNealy and Steve Jobs (he's great at the various Apple events, but perhaps something more.. serious).
Re:I wish more people did this.. (Score:2, Funny)
Re:I wish more people did this.. (Score:3, Funny)
Re:I wish more people did this.. (Score:4, Informative)
Actually, that happened at OSCON 2003. After Larry's talk, Guido van Rossum talked about the state of Python, Shane Caraveo talked about the state of PHP, Monty Widenius and David Axmark talked about the state of MySQL, Ted T'so talked about the state of the Linux kernel, and Greg Stein talked about the state of the Apache Foundation (not specifically Apache httpd).
Long night.
Parent
Re:I wish more people did this.. (Score:3, Funny)
Microsoft Annual Report [microsoft.com]
Apple Annual Report [corporate-ir.net] (2003 doesn't seem to be available yet)
Sun annual report [sun.com]
FYI - they typically come out in the spring for the previous years. The SEC "encourages" that.
video of the speech? (Score:5, Interesting)
Tom Christiansen (Score:2, Interesting)
Anyone there in person, who can report how he meant it?
Re:Tom Christiansen (Score:4, Informative)
In his talk about Tom Christiansen his tone seemed to be half humour/half endearing. I'd say there's no ill will between them, or between Larry Wall and people who have ADHD in general.
If you run xscreensaver -demo and follow along you might get a bit clearer picture of what he wanted, but then again maybe not. Half the time it seemed like he was running the wrong screen saver, or the screen saver he chose didn't appear to apply to his topic. Then again, at other times (like where he demonstrates how his mind solves puzzles) it was very funny and appropriate.
OT: What I really want to see is the "Life, the Universe, and Everything" keynote transcription, it was the last one that night. In it I saw perl6 extensions used to create variables with dual values, and Conway's Game of Life written in perl...in Klingon! If anyone has a link to this program, or can remember the CPAN::Klingon module's name it'd be great.
It was great being at the State of the Onion address in person, but from reading last year's address, I came away with the opinion that Larry Wall is a better author than orator, and his language can be mildly stilted at times. But what more could be expected from a hacker?
Parent
VM: The Way to Go? (Score:5, Interesting)
So, just to hear your opinion: do you think Perl is going to be better off for having a virtual machine? I personally think it's much easier to get good performance from
higher-level languages than machine code (which is possibly why Parrot code seems to be more high level than typical machine code). Of course, going further away from
the source language (thus lower level) increases chances of interoperability with other languages, which is something that Microsoft has realized with
a bit doubtful about whether Parrot is a wise choice for Perl, but I must admit I have not been following things very closely.
Re:VM: The Way to Go? (Score:3, Informative)
Re:VM: The Way to Go? (Score:2)
Keep in mind that the machine here is a virtual one. Intuitively, it's more costly to emulate every instruction in a machine language than whole functions.
Perl, it's the new COBOL (Score:4, Insightful)
Perl was great, it introduced many people to programming, just like COBOL did. But now it's time to move on. To move on to languages that learnt from perl, that improved on it, that don't have to drag around a syntax and culture that values neat tricks and trying to guess what the programmer really meant over providing the needed building blocks and letting you build code that does what you say, not what it thinks it heard you say. Or even, dare I say it, to move on to languages outside the perl family for some programming and choose the right tool for the job for a change.
I'd prefer to think of this as provocative rather than a flame, there is a difference you know.
Re:Perl, it's the new COBOL (Score:3, Interesting)
COBOL is a dead end language. No evolution. Like Sanscrit.
Perl evolves. It will stay alive forever.
right tool for the job? Since when is duct tape not the right tool for any job? WTF kind of geek are you?
for the record, I write perl for a living, and due to the results of my last project, the company that used to be "java all the way, perl is on the way out" has now done a 180. It CAN be done right. But like any language, computer or human, m
Re:Perl, it's the new COBOL (Score:2)
Re:Perl, it's the new COBOL (Score:5, Insightful)
I think it's a false dilemma that you can either use Perl flexibly or write maintainable code. Surely a flexible language allows you to choose a coding approach that fits your team!
Regardless, I fail to see how agreeing on minutiae such as brace placement and indentation will make Perl inflexible. I don't understand on how agreeing to write short subroutines, use a consistent and descriptive naming scheme, and build a comprehensive test suite is unperlish.
In short, I think if your team can agree on a coding style, you can solve the maintainability program.
If you can't agree on a coding style, it doesn't matter which language you choose.
Parent
Re:Perl, it's the new COBOL (Score:3, Funny)
Was Larry Wall always insane (Score:2, Troll)
Re:Was Larry Wall always insane (Score:4, Funny)
Troll? But I meant "insane" as a compliment! :D
Parent
Oh. You mean like the language. (Score:2)
p
Re:Incoherent Rant (Score:2, Interesting)
With all due respect to Larry (and much is due) I have personally made more sense after several cold ones. Still can't wait for Perl 6 tho.
Re:Incoherent Rant (Score:3, Interesting)
heh, you obviously havent read any of his speeches before... :-)
Re:Incoherent Rant (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Incoherent Rant (Score:2)
I agree. Larry Wall is a good guy I'm sure, having given us Perl which is a fabulous tool and is free in all senses. But IMO his "State of the Onion" speeches are seldom if ever worth the effort. I framkly pass on reading them in full now, once I'm sure that a given one is the same
Re:Perl and software (Score:2, Informative)
Re:Perl and software (Score:3, Funny)
Re:Perl and software (Score:4, Informative)
PHP was originally a Perl application.
Parent
Re:Perl and software (Score:5, Insightful)
This is a theory, not a proof.
Parent
Re:A bit of a rant (Score:5, Insightful)
Perl matters.
Larry Wall wrote Perl.
Larry does these State of the Onion things. They aren't news. But it is news that he has done one.
Since Perl matters and Larry wrote Perl, and many people are interested in reading the State of the Onion, the news therefore matters. Perhaps not to you. But it would only need to matter to one person in order to qualify for mattering.
So to clarify, the news here wasn't supposed to be what was contained within the presentation (though there is news in there if you open your mind to read in between the lines, which I think you have done) but instead that the presentation exists at all.
Parent
You just didn't get it .. (Score:4, Insightful)
He was telling us, using screensavers as visual aids, what has been happening with himself over the last year - just like the "State of the Union" is supposed to do.
He was talking a bit about the make-up of the design team - using screensavers to illustrate how he sees the way other team members think.
He was also reminding us to think "outside the box" - using screensavers as visual aids for his talking points is very novel. And he was reminding us at the same time with a couple of of those points that people behind Perl don't necessarily think like the rest of you.
The greatest achievements in history are usually from people who thought "outside the box".
Remember, Larry Wall was a linguist who created a programming language that was simply made for generating reports easily.
And if you know anything about Asperger's Syndrome, you know that an Aspie's sense of humor is different from the rest of you.
I found the article very entertaining as well as informative as to why the state of Perl 6 may not be as far along as some desire. Sometimes things in life happen outside of programming.
Parent
Re:A bit of a rant (Score:5, Informative)
I agree with you, though I have to point out: There's really no way to determine whether
will return TRUE or FALSE without knowing the context, hence, in scalar context, will return TRUE in the "is not false" meaning of the word. However, I think it's also somewhat clear that:in thatthe feature set of Perl 6 is now stable, and yes,
there has been a delay, and yes,
Larry seems to have great confidence in the Perl development team, and yes,
his wife Gloria has veto power over the progress of the team toward the new Perl version.
Granted parsing the whole 4-page expression to evaluate such a simple expression is probably not that efficient. Maybe it's time to search CPAN for the Onion::WhatsItMean module.
Good luck to Larry with Perl 6 and his health.
Parent
Re:He talks about Perl? (Score:5, Insightful)
Now obviously, my bullet points are leaving out a lot of the information from the speech. One way of looking at things is that Larry is trying to convey a lot less concrete ideas through metaphors and imagery. Another way to look at it would be to consider it "spin" used to obscure the points. The other post that compared this to an SEC filing or a shareholder meeting has a point and if a corporation had to give news like this, there would probably be a lot of work trying to mitigate some of the harsher points that need to be made. In another point of view, this speech is supposed to be a rallying point for Perl developers, and as such is probably best to not just have the bare facts but also the opinions, and non-verbal points of view of the head of the perl development.
Parent
Re:He talks about Perl? (Score:3, Insightful)
Actually, parrot [parrotcode.org] is a virtual machine meant to run interpreted languages. That's one of the cool things about it -- ruby and python could both be written to run on it, and then a parrot-to-machine-code compiler could be written, and I could finally compile ruby. Yay!
Compiler != interpreter