State of the Onion 9 174
chromatic writes "Perl.com has just published Larry Wall's Ninth Annual State of the Onion address from OSCON 2005. In previous talks, he's used screensavers, music, and Unicode to explore Perl and open source. This year, he introduced the cast of characters in the Perl community in terms of spy movies and metaphors."
Ridiculous (Score:5, Insightful)
Perl can't continue to subsist solely on its established reputation of being the internet's 'glue'. An entire generation of developers have moved to other languages and frameworks. It looks more like Perl is going to end up as the next COBOL.
The world is moving on.
Forced labour is not the open source way. (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:From the article (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Screensavers, music, and Unicode? (Score:3, Insightful)
Go and play with PHP, kid.
Re:Perl 6 is a mistake. (Score:3, Insightful)
I think what you're exhibiting here is what I'd like to refer to as an "inverse God complex"
("inverse" is not the best word, admittedly, but I can't think of a better one) - you do a thought experiment where you try to do something (improve Perl), find that you can't do so in two minutes, and thus conclude that failure is *inevitable* (hence a God complex: if you can't do it, noone can) and that any *actual* attempt to do so must automatically fail as well.
Nevermind, of course, that lots of people, most of them much more intelligent than you and me, have worked on this problem for years; you're still able to not only dismiss their current work, but also all the work they have not done yet and conclude that they're not only doomed to fail, but in fact fail so catastrophically that Perl will die - that is already is dying.
Yes, definitely a God complex. Sorry.
Re:Questions for Larry (Score:5, Insightful)
You should not stick to Perl religiously but rather use the best tool for the job you need to get done. TIMTOWTDI, remember? If Python works for you, that's fine; if Python works better for you than Perl, then by all means, do use Python!
That's not to say that your decision to use Python is automatically right, but it's not automatically wrong, either, and without any knowledge whatsoever about the project you're working on, your personal preferences, your experiences and all that, how do you expect *us* (that is, the Perl community, although I can only speak for myself, of course) to tell you whether Perl or Python is the better tool for your job?
That's up to you to decide - we don't care what you use, although we may be interested in hearing why you didn't choose Perl.
Re:Screensavers, music, and Unicode? (Score:4, Insightful)
I want Perl 6 to be the community's rewrite of Perl and of the community.
And that's the chief reason why it's a directionless (or perhaps I should say omnidirectional) disaster that's not even close to production-ready after all these years. Programming language design by committee does not work.
Re:From the article (Score:3, Insightful)
ftp://ftp.ora.com/pub/graphics/book_covers/hi-res
Re:Perl Had Too Much Security (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:Forced labour is not the open source way. (Score:3, Insightful)
Perl6 is, in my opinion, a mistake. Probably perl5 was also a mistake (I've written many tens of thousands of lines of code in Perl5, and work with it full time, so I have some idea what I'm talking about). Perl4 was decent, for doing what Perl4 was used for - the Perl5 extensions make it *seem like* Perl is usable for more tasks. Actually, it IS usable for more tasks, and even more so than perl4 - just like a screwdriver with something protecting the head is more usable as a hammer than a screwdriver without something protecting the head.
For the space that Perl5 and especially Perl6 is trying to fit into, Ruby is the best design I know of today - design-wise and convenience-wise it improve on Perl5 in almost every way.
There's three particular usecases where it doesn't improve:
- Perl is better for one-liners (command line use).
- Perl is better if you need some particular obscure library from CPAN
- The change of the type system to actually have strong typing (instead of automatically converting between text and numbers) can be slightly inconvenient in some text parsing cases.
Apart from that, I've found Ruby to generally just be better. Half as much to type, more consistent, more powerful.
Eivind.
Re:What I've learned from Pugs. (Score:3, Insightful)
Perl was never about raw power. Perl has always been about providing quick access to stuff you need often: hash tables, regular expressions, plowing through files, and so on. Haskell is a more powerful language on a fundamental level, but not on the day-to-day usability level. They each have their uses.