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.'"
scripting (Score:5, Insightful)
Re: (Score:2)
I don't think Perl or Python are scripting languages. I think sh-script is a scripting language.
I don't like to think about AppleScript.
-:sigma.SB
Re:scripting (Score:5, Insightful)
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
C only has the data types supported by the hardware, so it is not a high-level language.
Uh, no. C has guaranteed data types that must be present in every implementation, such as 32 bit integers (not native to 8 bit processors) and floating point (not native to many processors). It is true that C has flexible data types that can be optimized for particular hardware.
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
It doesn't. It does, however, require a 32 bit integer data type (which the OP said). long has to be 32 bits on a conformant implementation.
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
It doesn't. It does, however, require a 32 bit integer data type (which the OP said). It doesn't. It does, however, require a 32 bit integer data type (which the OP said).
Close, but not correct. C requires *at least* 16 bits for a short, and *at least* 32 bits for a long. It actually doesn't require an exactly 32 bit integer datatype. Well, to be really pedantic, the C Standard specifies a range of values that a datatype must support, so technically a binary machine is not required.
Re: (Score:2)
What have you been smoking? Since when does C require ints to be 32 bits?
It doesn't, but I realize I phrased my post poorly. I meant that C requires an integer with at least 32 bits, which is typically not native to an 8 bit processor.
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
When you compile C the assembly code looks like the C code. You can do it yourself at least as well as gcc, usually better. Subroutine calls and stack frames follow standard, simple rules and leave a lot of room for optimization. Structs and unions are just a list of offsets and bookkeeping. There's basically nothing in the compiled code that you don't write in the C source code or include in a very straightforward way fr
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
Hand compiling is only moderately more complicated for Perl than it is for C. Just as the C function turns into a specific pattern in assembler, the various things that Perl provides can be turned into assembler patterns too. The stuff that Perl does for memory management implicitly is only moderately more complex than the stack manipulation that C does implicitly for lexical variables. Even the two data structures that Perl provides - vectors and hashes - are just very simple data structures that would alw
Re: (Score:2)
C is not a high-level language because it is sugar-coated assembly.
Re: (Score:2)
That's how you would define high level language if you were trying to exclude C, and even then it's arguable - malloc is part of the C language for example. Sure, you'll argue that it's a function call - part of the standard library not the language - but that's really just a question of syntactic sugar - C-like language where malloc was a keyword with special syntax wouldn't be any higher level than C.
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
For example, most would categorize vehicles as either boats, airplanes, automobiles, or trains. Categorizing languages by "scripting" or "compiled" is like grouping boats and trains into the same group if they happen to be the same color.
The language syntax and featureset matters far, far
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
To me, the term scripting has nothing to do with the level of abstraction. Rather, it is more about whether or not the source is directly interpreted or compiled into an intermediate form. Having said that, I must admit that it would be awfully silly to create a low level language that is interpreted.
From most of the languages that he lists, it looks to me that what he is really talking about are Dynamic Scripting Languages. Scripting languages that are also dynamic provide a lot of flexibility and can
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
Re: (Score:2, Interesting)
Languages like Python make it easier to design and implement algorithms without having to worry about other concerns.
High level != "automated memory management" (Score:5, Informative)
Can we please stop bashing C++ memory management? I write C++ for a living, yet very rarely use what the critics typically call "manual memory management". Either it's really not that hard to do things in better ways, or I guess I must be a superhuman programmer, because according to all the checking software, I haven't introduced a memory leak since... no, actually, I've never introduced one in as long as I've worked here. If you want to talk about the advantages of garbage collection, knock yourselves out, but please stop treating C++ and C as if they're the same in terms of memory management. They are different worlds.
In any case, garbage collection is far from the biggest benefit of using a scripting language (or whatever we want to call them) over something lower level. As others are pointing out, the more important properties exhibited by most of the modern scripting languages that make them "high level" include first class data structures, first class functions, and dynamic typing.
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
Before anyone else points it out, I realised that my final sentence in the parent post reads as though I think dynamic typing is necessary for a high-level language. I don't think this is so in general, but in the context of scripting languages, I think it's one of the key features that lets you write higher level code more easily. In a statically typed language, some sort of type inference serves a similar role, keeping the code generic and cutting out unnecessary boilerplate code.
Re:High level != "automated memory management" (Score:5, Insightful)
If we don't insist on treating the tools themselves as the end product, then how will we perpetuate mis-information, and sell "new" products, which are, dared we look at them objectively, just re-shufflings of what has come before?
Re: (Score:2)
I guess you haven't used STL.
I have not used Perl for a while but when I did I would have called it a scripting language. It just didn't lend it's self to large programs. Python looks like it is better for large tasks but I haven't had time to get into it.
Perl and PHP are what I consider the crescent wrenches of programing.
Not the best tool but just too u
Re: (Score:2)
Is the fact that dynamic datastructures (lists, hashes) are native, so programmers don't have to worry about mundane memory address and pointer nonsense.
I guess you haven't used STL.
Assuming you're referring to the container classes in the C++ standard library, those are nothing close to having first class data structures and good language support for them. You can't write literals using them, for a start. Even what they do do is clumsier than in languages with built-in support, e.g., Perl's neat sort keys %hash, Python's yield facility and for loop, Haskell's pattern matching for list processing, and many similar ideas in these and many other languages.
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
That's not like C or Java, when what happens when the program runs is what is inside the main function (or static method). And that happens only after you turned your text file into something else.
I think we may be creating a category where there is none or, better, we a
Re: (Score:2)
Most IDEs let you compile and run at least basic C/C++ code from the IDE, without any additional steps.
Re: (Score:2)
Pedantic mode ON .pyc is python source code compiled to bytecode. That bytecode is then interpreted by the Python virtual machine which executes appropriate machine code, sort of like the Java VM (though I don't think the Python VM does JIT compilation to machine code).
A
This is different from a.out (or the more modern alternative, ELF), which contains real machine code, which is execu
Re: (Score:2)
I win the pedantry wars and my point stands
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
Every people use the term differently. Here is mine : I am doing a script when I give directives to launch programs or functions written in another language. When the CPU spends 90% of its time outside my program, I consider that this is a script.
Python's philosophy is that it is a scripting language in the sense that if you spend more than 10% of your CPU time interpreting some python
Re: (Score:2)
No.
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
But also, what is Java then? A scripting language?
Perl 6: The Language of the Future (... Forever) (Score:5, Funny)
Re:Perl 6: The Language of the Future (... Forever (Score:3, Informative)
And this year he barely even did that!
Fine by me (Score:4, Insightful)
I view Perl 6 as an continued employment mechanism for those who write books about Perl and teach Perl to others.
Re: (Score:2, Insightful)
BUT if it was 20-30 times faster people would be able to use it for a lot more stuff where they'd otherwise have to resort to stuff that involves a lot more work
Parrot hasn't been very impressive, and ponie is dead anyway.
Yeah I know python is a bit faster and cleaner but so far it doesn't seem like a huge improvement.
I've looked at Lisp and I've come to the conclusion that:
Lisp is powerful for
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
I'm not a Perl wizard, but I have used it. I find a lot more limitations than just slowness.
Calling on external C functions from Perl is a pain. You can't ignore all those C functions, there's way too many useful ones out there. There's UNIX system calls, XWindows and higher level GUI libraries, socket and networking stuff, file manipulation, and everything in libc. Perl has a good bit of that covered natively, but suppose you want to use OpenGL? Then you're stuck trying to figure out Frozen Bubble f
perl 5.10 should not be neglected (Re:Fine by me) (Score:3, Interesting)
perl 5.10 is about to be released, and it has a number of significant improvements over perl 5.8. Off the top of my head: it has a real "switch" statement included (as originally designed for perl 6), it has recursive regular expressions that can be used to do Text::Balanced sorts of things (if for some reason that now-standard module doesn't do it for you), and a number of new modules have been
Re:Perl 6: The Language of the Future (... Forever (Score:3, Funny)
Re: (Score:2)
Re:Perl 6: The Language of the Future (... Forever (Score:4, Interesting)
Re: (Score:2, Insightful)
I'm not saying that ugly Perl doesn't exist, because it sure as hell does. Perl does not enforce any coding standards at all on its programmers, so undisciplined coders will write undisciplined code, but I'd rather be in Perl's side of the enforcement continuum than, say, Java's or Python's side.
Re: (Score:2, Insightful)
Re: (Score:2)
Perl will let you approach a problem however you want. Imperative, functional, OO programming all works out of the box; constraint, logic, aspect programming are possible. This liberates many programm
Re: (Score:2)
No! You need to know the whole of the language to work with three other people, each of whom knows a different part of the language.
Re: (Score:2)
And his point is that that's why hideous syntax and features are a problem even if you choose not to use them.
Re: (Score:2)
Where do people get the idea that a programmer should be able to work on code -- professionally -- without learning the damn language? And that if this condition is not met, it's the language's fault?
You say that as if that's a good thing. Per
Re: (Score:2)
I'm not saying that ugly Perl doesn't exist, because it sure as hell does. Perl does not enforce any coding standards at all on its programmers, so undisciplined coders will write undisciplined code, but I'd rather be in Perl's side of the enforcement continuum than, say, Java's or Python's side.
I think which side of the enforcement continuum looks appealing is generally a function of the sort of project you're working on. The more programmers who all have to cooperate and work with each others code, and the greater the importance of long term maintenance, the more appealing strict enforcement becomes. Conversely, the more important rapid expression and development of ideas is, the more appealing lack of enforcement and flexibility in how you express things becomes.
So yes, if you have a big projec
Re: (Score:2)
Some use screws, some use nails; some use nuts and bolts, some use tapped holes. Some use gaffer tape. Perl doesn't mind which you use. The OP's complaint sounds like someone who has inherited a second-hand tool box and found no number 2 pos
Re: (Score:2)
timster wrote:
Which explains why Lisp is the leading programming used throughout the industry.
The trouble with the line you're taking is that you run into problems with "the waterbed theory of complexity": If you simplify the language, the libraries g
Awk is pretty clean ... (Score:2)
Personally, I take care to write my Perl in grunts and whistles, which are fairly universally understood. Except in those equivalent places where "nodding your head" means "no" and "extending your middle finger" means "hi there!"
Re:Perl 6: The Language of the Future (... Forever (Score:5, Funny)
Except for actually existing.
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (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?"
Yup... and he doesn't apologize for it (Score:5, Interesting)
Unless someone is willing to finance full-time development on Perl 6, this is the best we get. I think it's pretty good.
Re: (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:Yup... and he doesn't apologize for it (Score:5, Funny)
Re: (Score:2)
Yes. Which is why linguists allowed to design programming languages not should be.
Re: (Score:2)
Uh, no. It's like the computer language equivalent of what happened at the Tower of Babel. With line noise. And no hookers.
Re:Yup... and he doesn't apologize for it (Score:4, Funny)
Kicking myself for not saying paragraph instead of sentence.
Re: (Score:2)
In other news... (Score:4, Funny)
Re: (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."
Thanks, and see ya! (Score:2, Insightful)
However, I moved on several years ago. One of those Python guys inspired negatively by Perl. Much of what keeps me away from Ruby, in fact, is the Perl resemblance. I still have a legacy Perl application to maintain, but I don't do any new Perl work.
I'd think a regular "State of the Onion" pronouncement would be an avenue to discuss where we are today, and where we are headed, with Perl. Instead, it's a
Re:Thanks, and see ya! (Score:5, Insightful)
I guess I really don't get the purpose of the essay.
It was also (IMO) a damn fine read, with lots of intriguing rhetorical flourishes (I also learned a little C. [...] That's because a little C is all there is) and thought-provoking concepts, like how most human languages can express anything, but they differ in what you MUST express.
I think most people have a rough idea where Perl is now (present, though likely slipping as a % of interesting code being written) and where it's going (a guess about how the new perl 6 would be received when it finally shows up)
If the latter, well sure... there will almost be another way that is better in some subset of the parameters you could use to measure "Betterness". One tradeoff you always have to make is how much time and conceptual effort do you put into optimizing that...
Re: (Score:2)
It's not entirely clear what you're getting at here, but this brings up a bit of a peeve with me: we all know that lanugage snobs dislike perl -- why they appear to dislike it more than the far-worse PHP is hard to discern, but clearly they do -- but you shouldn't jump from that to the conclusion that use of perl is dwindling. For example, if you look a
Re: (Score:2)
My guesstimation that Perl is dwindling was based on A. fewer headhunters who were appearing to
Re: (Score:2)
You mean, except for the complete absence of any namespaces in PHP?
PHP's technical advantages, as I understand it, are (1) a smaller memory footprint; and (2) ISP's seem to feel it's easier for them to support.
I can see how those would be
Re: (Score:2)
When I was playing with PHP in 2002, then, the DISadvan
the provocative larry wall (Score:3, Interesting)
Actually, it occurs to me that I probably do know why perl provokes such rabid responses, I think it's because of "The State of the Onion" talks.
Re: (Score:2, Offtopic)
Code should be pleasing to read, since we spend so much of our lives at this activity. I think Python and Ruby do well in this goal, though the double underscores like "__i
Re: (Score:2)
Much of what keeps me away from Ruby, in fact, is the Perl resemblance.
foo =~ /bar/ and $1 etc are probably the most used Perlish feature in Ruby. While I've never been a fan of Perl, I do appreciate the odd little shortcut like this. Where it's not suitable, there's always md = /bar/.match(foo), md[1], or indeed Regexp.new("bar").
Sigils like @ and $ have only a passing resemblence to Perl; they define scope, and can often be considered a warning sign ($foo -- zomg you're using a global you idiot! @foo -- hey, maybe you'd be better off using the accessor methods?), but the
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: (Score:2)
The real reason they didn't put Unix on it was because that machine was the *only* minicomputer on campus, and ran the school database (written by Larry) and cafeteria card readers. It was locked in to running those critical functions, and V7 Unix certainly wasn't going to run on the oc
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: (Score:2)
And the IBM-PC was, already, the same sorry inelegant mess it is today, so I won't get started. And it was very expensive too.
I learned to program in a Texas calculator and my first computer was an Apple II+ (after a Sinclair ZX-81 clone that was not a real computer) and, or course, I learned BASIC with
I remember the Dragon book... (Score:2)
wanna be annoyed? try this (Score:2, Informative)
your question may be answered if you are willing to sit through 3 hours of the alpha geeks sparring over who understands Damian Conways latest obsfucation most, hopefully with many examples of their own variations to programs that have no real use. meetup at break with someone who didn't participate in that discussion and note they don't know what the hell they are there for either
besides, anyone
Re: (Score:2)
This doesn't sound anything like the San Francisco Perl Mongers group I hang around with... neither does it sound much like the gang at perlmonks.org.
Sorry if you were traumatized by Tom Christensen, but maybe you need to grow some skin, you know?
Pair programming? (Score:2)
I'm not the world's most l33t programmer (far from it), but I did win a local programming contest a few years back -- due in large part, I think, to the fact that the other teams had to share a terminal, whereas I was working by myself. Anecdotal, I know -- but it gives me definite doubts about the wisd
Re: (Score:2)
Re:Pair programming? (Score:4, Informative)
Maybe one of them is a whiz the language and tools, and but is a bit fuzzy on the domain, and the other one is new to the language, but is a domain expert. At first the whiz does most of the keyboard work and the domain expert handles the meta stuff, but gradually they learn from each other and switching off helps them both progress. The domain expert might come to a point where he is trying to explain something complex, so decides to ask for the keyboard and type in some code that does it. It might not be syntactically correct or use the language structure in the best way, but the whiz, looking on, can help clean it up once the ideas are down.
But really, you can't fully appreciate it until you try it with someone with experience in pair programming.
Perl 6 mailing list (Score:2)
http://dev.perl.org/perl6/list-summaries/ [perl.org]
Does that mean the future is over?
Worst presentation in a while. (Score:4, Insightful)
Re: (Score:2)
Yes, it's just you. Last year's collection of family pictures was way too fluffy, essentially a punt. This year's, by comparison, is an interesting overview of some technical issues, with a few interesting little quips tossed in. It's not as brilliant as his "postmodern computer language" talk, for example, but it's nothing to complain about.
I think the real trouble with these talks is that Larry Wall doesn't really have an overview of the
Put up or shut up, please (Score:3, Insightful)
Perl6 is a text book example of why rewrites are bad. While these people are busy writing the Programming Language to End All Programming Languages,
So please, put up or shut up.
See also: Netscape.
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
There is a large amount of programmers who found their comfort zone in certain loosely-typed languages, typically they did a lot of C, moved on to Perl and realized that they were much more productive in Perl, but not really realizing why, only thinking that Perl must be some holy grail. They are programmers who have never used Visual Studio or Eclipse or similar IDEs for strongly typed languages, they have *no* *idea* what refactoring is, and what it can do for your
So where IS perl 6, Larry? (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)