State of the Onion 11 278
chromatic writes "Larry Wall's State of the Onion 11 address is now online. Every year, he describes the state of Perl and its community through metaphor and analogy. This year, Larry explored the history of scripting languages, from their dimly-lit beginnings to their glorious future. Along the way, he also describes several of the design principles invoked in the design of Perl 6. 'When I was a RSTS programmer on a PDP-11, I certainly treated BASIC as a scripting language, at least in terms of rapid prototyping and process control. I'm sure it warped my brain forever. Perl's statement modifiers are straight out of BASIC/PLUS. It even had some cute sigils on the ends of its variables to distinguish string and integer from floating point. But you could do extreme programming. In fact, I had a college buddy I did pair programming with. We took a compiler writing class together and studied all that fancy stuff from the dragon book.'"
Perl 6: The Language of the Future (... Forever) (Score:5, Funny)
Re:scripting (Score:1, Funny)
Re:Perl 6: The Language of the Future (... Forever (Score:3, Funny)
In other news... (Score:4, Funny)
BASIC/PLUS (Score:3, Funny)
Oh wow, BASIC/PLUS on a PDP-11 running RSTS. That's how I started too. And yet, I became a Python guy. ;-)
Re:Perl 6: The Language of the Future (... Forever (Score:1, Funny)
Tell me again how this is bad?
Re:Yup... and he doesn't apologize for it (Score:5, Funny)
Re:BASIC/PLUS (Score:4, Funny)
So one day I decided that my calculator was GLAXIA, my PDP-11/44 which ran RSTS/E (V8 or V7, I forget which...)
I packed the whole thing on a cart; the system (Two BA11s), RA81 disk, and LA-120 teletype, and wheeled it into the classroom.
The teacher asked me what it was - "It's my calculator." The look on his face was priceless.
It was loud as hell, but the teacher allowed me to complete the test with it. I forget what I scored.
Thereafter the calculator policy was changed to read
"You may bring any calculator you like to calculator-allowed tests, provided it does not dim the lights when powered on."
Old hardware rocks!
Re:In other news... (Score:2, Funny)
"Then there's Duke Nukem Forever, a nice clean design. It has some issues, but in the long run Duke Nukem Forever might actually turn out to be a decent platform for running Perl 6 on. Pugs already has part of a backend for Duke Nukem Forever, though sadly that has suffered some bitrot in the last year. I think when the new Duke Nukem Forever engines come out we'll probably see renewed interest in a Duke Nukem Forever backend."
Re:Perl 6: The Language of the Future (... Forever (Score:5, Funny)
Except for actually existing.
Re:Yup... and he doesn't apologize for it (Score:4, Funny)
Kicking myself for not saying paragraph instead of sentence.
Re:Perl 6: The Language of the Future (... Forever (Score:3, Funny)
I wonder how this guy turned out: "Given this approach to learning Perl (just for a general working knowledge, maybe light usage,) is it really worth spending a lot of my time learning Perl now, or should I wait for the big Perl6 revision?"