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."
Screensavers, music, and Unicode? (Score:5, Interesting)
Hm.
Well I guess that explains then what he's been doing instead of fricking finishing Perl 6!!!
Seriously man I have completed a college education and an entire generation of video game consoles have passed in the time that Perl 6 has been coming "Real Soon Now".
What I've learned from Pugs. (Score:4, Interesting)
An entire generation of video game consoles. (Score:3, Interesting)
Finally! (Score:4, Interesting)
Just started reading this one, and it is delighting me by not giving me the impression Larry is on his deathbed.
Re:Could it have been any more boring? (Score:2, Interesting)
Of course functional programming is ancient. (Score:3, Interesting)
Why is it taking over now? It's because we hit the limits of imperative languages years ago, and we're at the point of hitting the limits of object-oriented programming. That's why we're seeing applications that were traditionally implemented in C (such as a Perl implementation) being implemented using Haskell.
A language like Haskell allows more complex programs to be developed in less time, with fewer lines of code, and with enhanced stability and maintainability. While Perl was known for such things as well, Haskell offers native code compilation and the benefits of functional programming.
Indeed, we see that functional programming has had a massive impact on languages like Ruby and Python as of late. That's because the trend is moving towards techniques pioneered by languages like SML, and now made widely usable by Haskell.
I have looked at Curry, but I am not a fan of logical programming. I much prefer pure functional, or at worst an imperative, OO functional language such as O'Caml.
Perl Had Too Much Security (Score:4, Interesting)
Job security, that is. It was so easy to write "job security applications" in Perl that even PHBs caught on to it. The next web scripting language should be based on a very careful study of how obtuse the syntax can be before the cost of maintaining it will be enough to make IT managers cry "enough is enough!" and throw out the entire application. And yes, although I was not the actual maintenance programmer on a Perl app, I was close enough to those who were to understand what had happened, The nature of Perl is such that it was probably not intentional. I mean, it looked like the code was well organized, but no God help anybody who wanted to change it.
Re:Screensavers, music, and Unicode? (Score:4, Interesting)
Quite frankly, a cleaned up object model is just what perl needs. Well, in addition to some standardized handling of threads, and some other features that most OO languages have.
Perl isn't Ruby. Perl isn't Python. Perl isn't PHP. Perl is its own animal/vegetable/mineral. It may not be your cup of tea, which is quite obvious, but thats a Good Thing. It means that Perl isn't giving into peer pressure from other programming languages and simply becoming a weak amalgam of language X/Y/Z with a few more dollar signs strewn about.
I like Perl. It truly makes coding a fun event for me. I am not bound by many of the restrictions of other languages, unless I want to be. It allows me to write a program in a form that more closely resembles the ideas and designs I have in my head than any other language I have tried.
Go Perl.
Re:Perl Had Too Much Security (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:Screensavers, music, and Unicode? (Score:1, Interesting)
I really agree with lumpy. but then I also think that PHP and python are getting too bloated as well. keep the core clean and mean then let people EASILY install the extras (perl needs to be able to have extras seperate like PHP does)
BTW, I also would kill for a perl interpeter in my phone or pda. right now it wont do that.
pageturning issues (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:Screensavers, music, and Unicode? (Score:4, Interesting)
I know replys that begin "you should be thankful, imagine if..." suck, but:
Be a Python programmer for awhile and see the *other* extreme: a programming language that never stops being a moving target! Wrote a program in Python yesterday? It's outdated, they no longer use that function, you gotta re-code it. Should you do it today? Nahhh, it's nearly five o'clock, better wait for tomorrow's edition of Python so we get a whole day's use out of it.
Let's make a deal, six months out of the year, we swap Larry for Guido.
Re:Screensavers, music, and Unicode? (Score:3, Interesting)
If there are things, I'm really curious to hear about them, as that should mean that there's some interesing Perl paradigms I don't know...
Eivind.
Re:Screensavers, music, and Unicode? (Score:3, Interesting)
a = %w( ant bee cat dog elk ) # create an array
a.each { |animal| puts animal } # iterate over the contents
5.times { print "*" }
3.upto(6) {|i| print i }
('a'..'e').each {|char| print char }
ARGF.each { |line| print line if line =~