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State of the Onion 7
Posted by
michael
on Thu Jul 17, 2003 07:35 AM
from the cry-cry-cry dept.
from the cry-cry-cry dept.
chromatic writes "One of the highlights of every OSCON is Larry Wall's annual State of the Onion address, covering Perl, philosophy, linguistics, music, theology, science, and usually a few other things thrown in for good measure. His talk from OSCON 2003, State of the Onion 7, is now online."
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He's a funny b@stard.... (Score:2)
(http://slashdot.org/~sould)
heh...polly wanna cracker?
My experience (Score:5, Insightful)
(http://www.shopping-cart-reviews.com/)
"Let's take another look at the pink tennis court. I mean, the universal architectural diagram. It really isn't quite as universal as I've made it out to be. First, let's get rid of the pink."
This is the thoughts of the man behind perl. This explains a *lot* about perl.
Re:My experience (Score:5, Funny)
unintentionally insightful (Score:5, Insightful)
Both are very, very amusing/accessible, and very complex.
If you skip around in an attempt to "get" either of them, looking for an executive summary, you end up walking away scratching your head, because neither was "designed" (although Larry would have no trouble with that word, I do) that way. They both evolved (and now I'd really wonder what Larry would say to *that*).
But if you give a little time towards trying to understand them, both are hugely rewarding, make you think, and have proven themselves extremely useful.
The "peeling an onion" metaphor is is especially apt - there's always something new to learn.
Re:My experience (Score:4, Insightful)
This explains a *lot* about perl. . I thought the same thing in two ways: (1) Perl is a motley and this shows why; (2) Perl needed someone like Wall for the community to form. Constructing both a language and community is more like performance art than an exercise in BNF. In general the audience enjoys the performance when the performer is also engaged - and I suspect he was having a blast.
If you like your philosophy written more seriously - please take some Tristan Tzara [cwd.co.uk] as an antidote.
In Soviet Russia... (Score:5, Funny)
(http://chickensh.it/)
Is Larry a slashdot regular ? :)
Now, some of you young folks are too steeped in postmodernism to know anything about postmodernism, so let's review. Postmodernism in its most vicious form started out with the notion that there exist various cultural constructs, or texts, or memes, that allow some human beings to oppress other human beings. Of course, in Soviet Russia it's the other way around. Which is why they managed to deconstruct themselves, I guess.
Re:In Soviet Russia... (Score:5, Informative)
(http://www.sff.net/people/Daniel.Dvorkin | Last Journal: Friday October 12, @01:42PM)
Re:In Soviet Russia... (Score:4, Informative)
"State of the Onion"? (Score:1, Funny)
(Last Journal: Sunday October 27 2002, @04:19PM)
The Onion? (Score:2, Offtopic)
(http://www.igoogle.com/ | Last Journal: Friday September 19 2003, @08:41AM)
Ponie (Score:4, Informative)
For those who are wondering, a 'pony' is cockney rhyming slang for crap:
Pony and trap: crap.
Re:Ponie (Score:4, Informative)
(http://husk.org/)
"I wanna pony!"
"Here, stroke the lovely pony."
"Pony drop!" - lots of ponies for the terminally stressed.
The origins of the phrase are lost in the mists of time. However, it's possible that someone was acting quite a lot like a seven year old at the time.
Larry's Lost It (Score:1)
(http://www.caperet.com/ | Last Journal: Friday August 05 2005, @07:18AM)
Incidentally Ponie is 25GBP (well, a pony, really)... Only Fools & Horses, "stick a pony in me pocket", you English will be with me on that.
But really, now there's this Parrot, that's going to help Perl5 become Ponie, to give birth to Perl6. Madness. (English will be with me again, "One step beyonnnnnd")
Jeez I'm even sounding like Larry. Anybody care for some Objective Orientation towards a real page for what PERL 6 is really supposed to be about?
State of the Onion (Score:2, Funny)
seriously (Score:1, Troll)
(Last Journal: Wednesday April 09 2003, @05:06PM)
Re:seriously (Score:5, Insightful)
(http://www.syners.org/ | Last Journal: Thursday November 07 2002, @02:42PM)
Maybe because the goals evolve has the language evolves..
Re:seriously (Score:5, Insightful)
(Last Journal: Monday November 27 2006, @04:43PM)
Languages evolve, and that's all there is to it. Should development of C, C++, PHP, Python, Ruby, etc. be stopped because they have acheived their initial goals?
No, of course not. Let them evolve, as they all have done and continue to do.
Re:seriously (Score:4, Insightful)
(http://skryche.livejournal.com/)
Maybe he likes developing Perl.
Larry Wall is Ned Flanders. (Score:5, Funny)
(http://put-your-mone...r-mouth-is.com/blog/ | Last Journal: Monday January 29 2007, @02:44PM)
my favorite (Score:3, Funny)
Boy, was this right on target or what?
Cheap (Score:2, Insightful)
I don't know Perl, but I know I like the text and I get his points. It makes me consider studying Perl.
There is some really interesting low level language stuff going on. State of the art I suspect.
You sir, are part of the ungrateful and you are certainly unwilling to get any clue about the article at all. You only produce a cheap flamebait...
Threat to Perl (Score:5, Funny)
(http://www.grant.org.uk/)
Perl 6 goals too lofty, nebulous (Score:1, Interesting)
IT Workers' Creed (Score:5, Funny)
(http://www.nathanpralle.com/blog/ | Last Journal: Wednesday August 14 2002, @11:47AM)
We the unwilling,
led by the unknowing,
are doing the impossible
for the ungrateful.
We have done so much for so long with so little
We are now qualified to do anything with nothing.
You would be surprised... (Score:5, Informative)
(Last Journal: Wednesday October 31, @11:09AM)
Source here. [brainyquote.com]
-Cyc
You would also be surprised... (Score:5, Informative)
(http://paperlined.org/)
Oh, the humanity! (Score:5, Funny)
(http://analyser.oli.tudelft.nl/)
For God's sake, give this man back his caffeine!
Hmmm (Score:5, Insightful)
(http://www.justgiving.com/garethowen | Last Journal: Thursday October 31 2002, @02:07PM)
Larry Wall is everything that Eric Raymond believes himself to be.
Re:Hmmm (Score:5, Insightful)
(Last Journal: Saturday February 10 2007, @10:12AM)
They're rather more like the Wozniak and Jobs of the computer worl- oh, wait, guess I can't say that. I'll say it anyway.
Seriously, though, both of these guys are very important to the present and future of computer programming. However, they fill different niches, much like the two Steves. They're not in direct competition. They're both visionaries, but one is more apt to build tools and the other is more apt to evangelize, in order to see their visions come true. I don't know these guys in real life, but I would be surprised to find any enmity between them, which I'd expect to find if one of their egos got deflated by the other's abilities.
A guy tried to impress me once by saying he once worked for or with ESR in some fashion. He couldn't explain exactly what he did or learned from the experience, so I treated it as starry-eyed syndrome or self-ego-building and ignored it. After all, when you work for an evangelist, your time is spent pushing the vision. It's hard to easily point to projects being done now and say that the Cathedral and the Bazaar and Magic Cauldron essays were directly responsible, but their perceivable impact will build over time. Oh, and there's something about him and open source, too, (whatever that is)...
The people I actually look up to when it comes to programming, on the other hand, almost always know perl, or at least feel inadequate if they don't. While it's not hard, learning it is an indication that you're serious about what you're doing. Larry's tools incorporate his ideas about how things should be done, (or that there's really not any one way some things have to be done, actually) and that invites quicker uptake on the part of people just trying to get things done.
(I'm only a dilettante, myself, but even I've been affected by Mr. Wall, anyway - my worthless claim to relevance, when I futilely try to impress people with name-dropping, is that I emailed Kibo when I was a kid asking about his usenet-searching script, and he told me this Larry guy had a new language, and I should talk to him for details on how to parse it. If only I was as willing to learn at the time as Larry always has seemed to be, to teach! Which is yet another trait he seems to share with Mr. Wozniak.)
Enough with the flames already (Score:5, Insightful)
(http://lobsteraliens.com/ | Last Journal: Friday November 01 2002, @12:16AM)
Sure Larry can be a bit eccentric but he's mildly amusing and he has some really good ideas about language design that challange the current ones. He's also willing to learn from good ideas from other languages (Creating a VM for example for multiple languages to target to).
And another thing, the whole "You can't read Perl or figure out old programs" bit is getting old. You can do that in ANY language. You can also follow some generally accepted formatting rules and your code will look just fine and be readable by any halfway experienced coder.
Rant off.
Re:Enough with the flames already (Score:5, Funny)
(http://www.grant.org.uk/)
Re:Enough with the flames already (Score:4, Informative)
I have written some code in Java and Perl for doing similar stuff (using text templates), and the perl code looks like someone is explaining in plain english. With perl5 and modules from CPAN , one can write very clean code.
S
Why expect anything else? (Score:5, Insightful)
(http://www.goofball.com/ | Last Journal: Wednesday January 15 2003, @02:35PM)
Larry Wall is clearly a genious, and actually has a huge range of interests aside from software. One year, he talked about chemistry. The last time I was at the Open Source conference, he talked about music (and demonstrated his abilities in playing about 30 different instruments). I can still remember the puzzled look on many people's faces and some even getting up and leaving. So this year, the theme is jokes ...
For the harcore Perl person, I guess the key is to look carefully for anything related to the future of the language in between all the silliness. Maybe he's trying to tell everyone there are a great many things to life outside programming. More likely he's just got a twisted sense of humor. I found the best thing to do was to kick back and enjoy it for the entertainment value - a relatively tough concept when you're not seeing it in person and only looking at a printout though :-(
Painted Pony? (Score:2)
(http://www.jroller.com/page/shareme/Weblog | Last Journal: Tuesday September 03 2002, @07:25AM)
Hey, Larry... (Score:3, Funny)
Who else noticed... (Score:2, Interesting)
Know why? They're probably using HTML::Mason to script pages that should have been flat HTML. Instead, the cutesy query string for each page gets processed for every request.
And, golly, why break the talk up into 11 "pages" in the first place? For better advertising for O'Reilly, perhaps? Or do the webmasters think that we can't handle a long vertical scroll bar? Give it to me straight up!
Before you think this is a pure troll, I love Perl and I think Larry is cool. But I have yet, after many years of working with Perl, to come to grips with the business relationship between Perl and O'Reilly. (And yes, I have lot's of Nutshell books and most of the Perl lineup on my bookshelf.) C'mon, Tim, you can make money fast without resorting to counting every click-through on the perl.com site and ensuring there's a unique ad at the top of the page. That's so 90's.
Larry funny? (Score:3, Insightful)
(http://www.heroicproportions.org/)
Perhaps his prior "State of the Onion"s are better... can't say I've read them.
I don't know Mr. Wall, but from the way others gush about him, I suspect he is an interesting fellow, and I certainly love Perl... but his humor doesn't appear to be his strong point. :(
His talk really could have been only 10 seconds:
o The movers of the world tend to be the unreasonable.
o Deconstructionism is about understanding and breaking down "oppressive" memes.
o Postmodernism is about using a common word to mean its opposite.
o Perl5 is done, a new Perl 5 based on Parrot will be called Ponie and will be the transition step to Perl 6, which will also be based on Parrot. (Which everyone who cares about Perl already knew anyway.)
If this a typical "State of the Onion", I hope the organizers cut him down to those ten seconds sooner, rather than later...
The State of the... (Score:4, Informative)
(http://www.faeriemud.org/)
...Onion was good, but to hear it you had to sit through five other "State of" speeches which were terminally boring. (Well, the "State of the Snake" wasn't boring, but its schizotypic references to the "Pythonic way" of doing things went a long way toward explaining why the Python community is so paranoid.)
A hidden gem [rubyist.net] appeared later in the week when Yukihiro "Matz" Matsumoto gave his "State of the Corundum" speech. (Actually it wasn't called that. It was called "The Power and Philosophy of Ruby.") The subtitle alone ("how to create babel-17") had the packed room buzzing before he started: "He's going to turn us into uber-assassins with no sense of self!"
The slides are available online (link above) and are definitely worth taking a look at. He's kinda sensitive about his English, so don't flame him unless your Japanese is better. Matz's philosophy is also guided by this maxim: "Be humble, be minor, be happy."
Impossible Object Oriented (Score:5, Interesting)
(http://dylanfreak.djeaux.com/ | Last Journal: Thursday February 12 2004, @09:39PM)
Maybe I'm reading this wrong, but in all those pink tennis court diagrams was the concept of Parrot as a universal interpreter for Perl 5, Perl 6 & a heap pile of other languages. While it's an interesting concept in & of itself, it suggests to me that the advent of Perl 6 will not mean the demise of Perl 5, which is something I find quite comforting. And then Wall takes the "impossible object" widget, turns it into a comb & uses that to illustrate Parrot. Whoa!
This was the most fun read I've had in a while.
.Net competitor? (Score:3, Insightful)
I found it interesting that Larry didn't mention how this is positioned (philosophically, or technically) in relation to .Net which is offering a similar sort of framework.
I guess one big difference here will be that you probably wont have to compile your programs, even down to byte-code - it will just do it on the fly. (At least it seems that it will be that way, given the current nature of perl)
What could be cool though would be being able to call code from python, perl, php, java, and whatever from within your app (which could be in any of these languages too). But I guess that is just the whole .Net buzz anyway - Theoretically at least.
I like Perl (Score:4, Interesting)
Perl remembers that you still have to use functions to cause things to happen. According to your fancy object-oriented stuff -- Java, Ruby and the like -- the recipe for making beans on toast goes like this; At least Perl remembers that you still have to execute functions. A saucepan on a stove is a function: you put something into it, it gets changed in some way {in this case it gets hotter}, and you take something out of it. Now, beans do have a measurable temperature, but to me at least it doesn't make any sense to imagine sliding the thermometer to cause the temperature of the beans to change. I expect to have to call a function to cause the beans to get hot.
Speaking of functions, I do love the way you call functions in Perl; you don't need to know or care in advance how many arguments your function is going to need, nor what to call them, because they just come through as one array which is always called @_. Oh, and Perl {and this definitely influenced PHP} indicates variable types with a prefix, so even within speech marks, it can spot a variable and insert the value.
PHP is a bit easier for creating web pages. It automates some of the things Perl makes you do for yourself {like grabbing form variables and function parameters} and you don't have to remember to send a MIME type, but comparing PHP to Perl is like comparing DJ's record decks to a Dansette autochanger. A DJ needs a level of control over the record playing process that automation would take away. Someone who just wants to listen to a stack of records from beginning to end and doesn't mind waiting a little while between songs doesn't need that level of control.
Another "feature" of Perl is that it's possible to write a piece of code you completely understand one day, and it to be so perfect, crystal-clear and obvious that commenting would spoil it; yet a mere 24 hours later, that same code whose beauty you appreciated and with which you Became One, has turned to gibberish.
Correction (Score:1, Funny)
Wasn't that Tracy Lords?
Oh, sorry, I'm think of the Adult Film Best Actress Award...
To summarise the summary... (Score:5, Interesting)
(http://www.mihalis.net/)
It's A Beautiful Mind all over again. Perl 6 is the Riemann Hypothesis. Larry Wall is John Nash, except there may never be a Nobel prize for scripting languages. It's going to kill him or drive him mad. Forget about killing Microsoft, how do we keep Larry alive and sane?
Parrot - yet another virtual machine strategy (Score:3, Interesting)
(http://www.animats.com)
It's interesting that these virtual machines exist primarily for strategic reasons. Each group wants to control their run-time platform. So they have to insert an interpretive layer between their language and the operating system. Why? Because the operating system is usually from Microsoft, and Microsoft keeps changing their API to lock people into Microsoft products.
It's worth noting that taking this route implies a battle with Microsoft. They hate it when someone puts a portable platform on top of their OS. Look what they did to Java, Netscape, Borland... This decision puts Perl on a collision course with Microsoft.
Reminds me of an old song... (Score:1)
i just read through it all. (Score:1)
and the first word that came to mind is 'certifiably...'
- rabs
Re:Brilliant (Score:2)
(http://www.aug24.co.uk/)
What, better than making geek jokes? Are you mad? Perl-ease! ;-)
J.
Ruby is a bloated mess and snail-slow (Score:1, Informative)
Ruby is a bloated godawful idiosyncratic mess with even less elegance than Perl, and it combines that with the unpardonable sin of being horribly slow:
Execution times for recursive FP factorial(n)
Language / seconds for n=1 n=180
C 0.001 0.013
Lua 0.010 0.080
Ocaml 0.130 0.180
Perl 0.020 0.360
Python 0.110 0.780
Ruby 0.290 1.230
So, good luck to you, always nice to see a troller make the wrong decision and limit his future prospects.
Re:Perl 6 is a mistake IMHO (Score:1)
Does he want Perl 6 to be flex or something?
No, given the power of Perl6 regexps, a comparison to lex+yacc would be more appropriate. And I think this is one good thing, too. Strong parsing of data is IMO a very good thing to have tightly integrated into a language.
-Lasse