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Perl Programming

Larry Wall's State of the Onion 8 161

Posted by michael 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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Larry Wall's State of the Onion 8 More

Larry Wall's State of the Onion 8

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  • Perl 5x is great, Ruby 1.8x is greater. P6 v R2? (Score:2, Interesting)

    by Anonymous Coward
    I really enjoy both Perl and Ruby (Ruby even more so because everything's an object and the syntax for iterators/blocks/closures).

    Would be interesting to see if parrot successfully unites various scripting languages.

    • Python is a reality (Score:2, Interesting)

      by tabo_peru ( 582809 )
      Everything in Python is also an object, it has a clean and terse syntax and the language and it's libraries is already a reality. I've been using it to do some SERIOUS work at a telecomunications company. It's not a toy language.
      • I would agree. Georgia Institute of Technology (Georgia Tech) has now changed the undergrad/cs/engineering curriculum and has made Python the FIRST language that students learn. GT is especially known for the engineering program and python is being used a lot by scientists and engineers around campus.
        • wow that is awesome...I had no idea...I would like to clarify that the mission of CS courses at GT is to "teach concepts," not to "learn languages". Hence my first CS course (august of 1999...still have another year of my undergrad...I am lazy) being taught using only pseudo code. I learned the concepts, sure, but the class would have been a lot more fun had we been using Python.

          At my job I work about half in C++ and half in Python...and it is a joy to use. I used to hate it and would only code in Perl.

      • Re:Python is a reality (Score:5, Insightful)

        by Uber Banker ( 655221 ) on Saturday August 21, 2004 @09:34AM (#10031762)
        Everything in Smalltalk is an object too. It also has a clean and clear syntax. It has been around for DECADES! Why not use that if everything being an object, and clean and clear syntax, are so revolutionary?

        • Re:Python is a reality (Score:5, Interesting)

          by Waffle Iron ( 339739 ) on Saturday August 21, 2004 @09:43AM (#10031795)
          Why not use that if everything being an object, and clean and clear syntax, are so revolutionary?

          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

          • Python is crap (Score:1, Insightful)

            by DarrenR114 ( 6724 )
            Positional languages like COBOL and Python make for difficult-to-maintain modules (especially when you're not the one who wrote them in the first place).

            And everything being an object is not necessarily a good thing either - a lot more overhead is involved when you have to create an entire object to do some simple communications.

            Been there - done that - sold the t-shirt to the next idiot in line.

          • Re:Python is a reality (Score:2, Insightful)

            by Anonymous Coward
            Surely too many, not enough and just right are subjective judgements. There is no need to use any parentheses in OO, either in practicality and certainly not in thought process, it is an imposition of the language which may make it easier to understand, to some degree, by some. The contents of parentheses are just elements of a command: a vectored command (embedded or not); doing away with parentheses, and the linear thought process of procedural programming it all arises from, could allow proper n-dimens
        • Everything in Smalltalk is an object too. It also has a clean and clear syntax. It has been around for DECADES! Why not use that if everything being an object, and clean and clear syntax, are so revolutionary?

          I think part of it is a matter of taste: I really don't like Smalltalk syntax. That's a personal thing. Coming from C/C++/Perl, Ruby's syntax made a lot more sense to me.

          Also, Ruby has certain other nice features lacking in Smalltalk (well, they might be there now as addons) like regular expressio
        • Smalltalk implementations are just not as well integrated with the Unix environment as Ruby is. They require this huge, language-specific, monolithic environment around them, practically an OS into itself. The only such language that's really been successful is Java.
        • Because NOT eveything should be an object ?

      • Re:Python is a reality (Score:2, Insightful)

        by Anonymous Coward
        Ruby is like the language Python wanted to be. I started with Perl, like most people.. When it came time to try a new language, I looked at what was available and settled on Ruby. The "everything is an object" mantra may seem tired and overused (which is what I initially thought), but it's turned out to be wonderful. Ruby also has so-called "duck typing" which is like polymorphism at its finest. I've become so much more productive in Ruby.

        Of course, it's not perfect. Ruby has its problems, I'm willin

        • Re:Python is a reality (Score:4, Informative)

          by Fweeky ( 41046 ) on Saturday August 21, 2004 @03:16PM (#10033579) Homepage
          Small and immature library collection

          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.

          It's been shown to be slower than some other languages; however speed hasn't been an issue with me yet

          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.

          Scope is broken in some cases; this is the biggest problem with Ruby and Matz admits it

          Do you have a ruby-talk reference?
      • It's being used at NASA, NOAA, Intel (check out the next Intel Compilers Evaluation CD [I think they call it the developer's CD now] - it's got Ruby on it ;-). There's the Rails [rubyonrails.org] Web app framework that's getting rave reviews.

        Lots of cool stuff going on in the Ruby-world now.
    • Yeah, once Ruby has at least UTF-8 everywhere, I'll be all over it.
  • Internal Server Error

  • Easily his best (Score:3, Insightful)

    by kidventus ( 649548 ) * on Saturday August 21, 2004 @08:44AM (#10031611) Homepage Journal

    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?
  • Through the use of various screensavers

    I hear that after the conference he was attacked by several members of ScreenPeace and PETS (People for Ethical Treatment of Screensavers).

  • Larry: (Score:1, Interesting)

    by Tei ( 520358 )
    Thanks for Perl, Its a cool lang to solve problems, coding fast powerfull code.

    About you, hehe, I am happy you are now active again. Cool. You are something like a hero or a friend, maybe both.

    Good Luck

    --Tei.

  • I wish more people did this.. (Score:5, Insightful)

    by Peter Cooper ( 660482 ) on Saturday August 21, 2004 @09:26AM (#10031732) Homepage Journal
    Larry is a bit off the wall, but I really wish other industry luminaries gave these annual 'State of [whatever]' doohickeys.

    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).

  • video of the speech? (Score:5, Interesting)

    by Harald Paulsen ( 621759 ) on Saturday August 21, 2004 @09:40AM (#10031785) Homepage
    Would be fun to watch.
    • There used to be great site technetcast [ddj.com] that had streaming presentations from all areas of computers and technology. Quite a few of previous years' state of the onion addresses are online. I guess they ran into money problems and stopped adding new content, but all the old content is still available for viewing.

      hgh

  • Tom Christiansen (Score:2, Interesting)

    by yow2000 ( 763256 )
    Is he having a go at his "good friend" Tom Christiansen"? It seems like it he's making a joke of it, but then switches back to serious. Not very nice.

    Anyone there in person, who can report how he meant it?

    My good friend Tom Christiansen, who does have ADHD, once said jokingly that I have "task-switching deficit" disorder. He's probably right on that. Certainly I seem to be stuck on this Perl thing. I've been stuck there for more than 15 years now. People think I make these long mental leaps all the t

    • Re:Tom Christiansen (Score:4, Informative)

      by Praeluceo ( 528253 ) on Saturday August 21, 2004 @03:05PM (#10033545) Homepage Journal
      I was at the OsCon '04 Keynotes. Larry Wall's State of The Onion Address was entertaining, if not a bit hard to follow at times. When he was discussing ADHD it seemed as though he was mostly using it to contrast his "opposite" problem, and make the point that any kind of singular personality (strictly ADHD bounciness, or strictly task-switching deficiency) was a bad thing, or at least not as productive as a good balance.

      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?
    • If you've ever seen this guy in person, he looks (or at least did in '96), and acts like Richard Simmons -- constantly dancing around, flaming, and a huge 'fro. It's seriously uncanny.

  • VM: The Way to Go? (Score:5, Interesting)

    by RAMMS+EIN ( 578166 ) on Saturday August 21, 2004 @10:11AM (#10031899) Homepage Journal
    I was recently having a discussion about Perl, and it briefly touched upon Perl 6 and its targetting the Parrot virtual machine. I would like to know what slashdotters think about the issue.

    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 .NET. I am really
    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:1, Interesting)

      by Anonymous Coward
      Perl using the virtual machine isn't going to be the advantage. I think the real advantage is that other languages will SHARE the virtual machine. Think about line after line of old basic code. You'll be able to share modules between languages, and even better be able to extend and maintain code which may not neccesarily be in the same langage. Think of an old BASIC app that works but is aging and not well documented. Running this through Parrot should allow you to write some additional modules to exte

    • Re:VM: The Way to Go? (Score:3, Informative)

      by smallpaul ( 65919 )
      You say that it "easier to get good performance from higher-level languages than machine code". That's a weird comparison. "Machine code" is a way of implementing higher level languages CPUs do not interpret Perl or Java. You need intermediate languages or runtimes. Perl has such an intermediate form today. "After locating your script, Perl compiles the entire script into an internal form." That's from the Perl documentation. If you want to have a discussion on this topic you need to be prepared to compare
      • ``You say that it "easier to get good performance from higher-level languages than machine code". That's a weird comparison.''

        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.
        • Most modern virtual machines have some form of JIT compilation, Parrot included.

          So, no, having a VM doesn't necessarily mean emulation at instruction-level granuarity.
    • So, just to hear your opinion: do you think Perl is going to be better off for having a virtual machine?

      What do you think Perl 5 runs on now? I don't see any compiled machine code lying around, do you? (With the exception of a couple of modules that inline various compiled things.)

      The horses are already out of the barn, and the barn has been burned down. Bit late to wonder if we'd be better off in the barn.
    • Initial tests seem to indicate that parrot will execute both perl and python faster then the current implementations.

      I for one am looking forward to our parrot overlords.
  • For those that don't know of Damian Conway, he is one hell of way out programmer (had to be an Aussie!):

    Lingua::Romana::Perligata -- Perl for the XXI-imum Century [monash.edu.au]

  • Perl, it's the new COBOL (Score:4, Insightful)

    by Anonymous Coward on Saturday August 21, 2004 @10:21AM (#10031955)
    For instance there is now OO COBOL but the only people that use it are COBOL programmers who are stuck, perhaps because of their company's dictates, perhaps by choice, with COBOL. In the same way perl may be heading towards irrelevance wrt "mainstream" language. I've written commercial perl in the past, it was a pain then and it's still a pain now. The thing is that now there are alternative languages in the same space (python, ruby etc., php for web side) that do the "perl thing" better than perl.

    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.
    • Java is a dead end language. No evolution. Like COBOL.
      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
      • Okay, a honest question for you: how do you manage to avoid Perl's reputation for write-only code? I've always thought that to use Perl in a large-scale project you would need so many guidlines to promote the "right" way to do it that would elimintate the flexibility of Perl. A large-scale project would (should?) have to lose all of the nifty tricks that make Perl so sweet to code in, because they are impossible to maintain when someone else wrote them. If so, why not just use Python which is cleaner and

        • Re:Perl, it's the new COBOL (Score:5, Insightful)

          by chromatic ( 9471 ) on Saturday August 21, 2004 @12:55PM (#10032840) Homepage

          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.

          • It's a trend in every language flame wars involving Perl recently to blame programmers deficiencies (ie unability to write readable code) on Perl's lack of strictly enforced policies. Really, it is sad to see otherwise smart people unable to do their job properly without being strongarmed into doing the right thing.
      • This could be one of the best flamebait posts ever. Includes:

        Java is dead.
        Java is like COBAL.
        Perl forever.

        I think this could make just about any Java programmer's head explode. Good job.
  • Or is this a new thing?
  • That was a truly beautiful speach, technically and poetically. Would have given even Cicero a run for the money.

    --
  • And here I was thinking, "How the heck did Larry Wall come to be associated with The Onion [theonion.com]? And does this mean that maybe they'll bring back their free archives?"

    p
  • When do we get Perl 6? Do we think it will be sometime in 2006? 2007?

    How much longer before the current work on Parrot and Ponie bear fruit that regular people can use?

    I want to start playing with the OO stuff from Apocalypse 12. I want it NOW!

    It seems like no one's talking about this... Are there any dates at all?

    It seems like Larry's talk had no content becuase everything that's going on now is too abstract and behind the scenes.

    The 5.8 and 5.9 codelines are moving along, Perl 6 is still in desig
  • Does anybody have the article text?

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