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Interview: Larry Wall

linuxvoice.com

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Re: Interview: Larry Wall

#11

Post by smacktoward »

yarou wrote: post #6

Larry Wall is a great guy. Perl brings me back to the days of my Pentium 2, tinkering about with my primitive IRC bots.

Perl was what made one my all-time favorite side projects possible.

Back around 2000, I was working at a mid-size company that stored tons of data in a company intranet. There was lots of useful stuff locked up in there, but hardly anybody ever used it because the web interface was clunky and slow.

One day I had a brainstorm, and after a few evenings' Perl hacking it was up and running -- a conversational interface to the intranet, running over AOL Instant Messenger. You added the bot as a buddy, and then you could query the intranet a bunch of different ways; IM it a client's name, for instance, and it would ping you back with their contact information, who their account reps were, what projects they were associated with, etc. (Which is very useful when your phone rings and it's someone you don't recognize.) Pretty nifty stuff, for the time. Everyone had AIM running all the time anyway, so this turned out to be a big hit -- much bigger than I ever expected.

And I probably never would have been able to get it working were it not for the ease of programming in Perl and the ability to tap into CPAN's massive library of code and take advantage of modules like Net::AIM (http://search.cpan.org/~aryeh/Net-AIM-1.22/AIM.pm). So thanks Larry, and thanks to all the Perl folks who contributed to CPAN over the years!

Re: Interview: Larry Wall

#12

Post by staunch »

codeshaman wrote: post #8

I love the shirt he's wearing in those pictures. What is it with geeks and psychedelic/hippie outfits ? Is it because of the patterns and colors, eccentricity or because of real involvement with the counterculture/psychedelia ? It's always fascinated and intrigued me. Any people 'in the know' care to elaborate on that ?

Probably more I-don't-care-what-you-think Unix hacker than psychedelic hippie.

Re: Interview: Larry Wall

#13

Post by cpach »

codeshaman wrote: post #8

I love the shirt he's wearing in those pictures. What is it with geeks and psychedelic/hippie outfits ? Is it because of the patterns and colors, eccentricity or because of real involvement with the counterculture/psychedelia ? It's always fascinated and intrigued me. Any people 'in the know' care to elaborate on that ?

Well he attended UC Berkeley in the 1970s, so it’s safe to assume that he has had lots of exposure to hippie culture.

There are actually quite strong connections between computer nerds and the counterculture of the 60s/70s. If you’re curious I recommend the following books:

# What the Dormouse Said: How the Sixties Counterculture Shaped the Personal Computer Industry / John Markoff. A great book with many fascinating characters.

# From Counterculture to Cyberculture: Stewart Brand, the Whole Earth Network, and the Rise of Digital Utopianism / Fred Turner. Also an interesting read, but much less accessible than Markoff’s book.

# The Cuckoo’s Egg: Tracking a Spy Through the Maze of Computer Espionage / Clifford Stoll. Very good book, reads like a detective novel in a Berkeley setting.

PS. More psychedelic shirt goodness this way: https://www.google.com/search?q=larry+wall&tbm=isch

Re: Interview: Larry Wall

#14

Post by cpach »

staunch wrote: post #12
codeshaman wrote: post #8

I love the shirt he's wearing in those pictures. What is it with geeks and psychedelic/hippie outfits ? Is it because of the patterns and colors, eccentricity or because of real involvement with the counterculture/psychedelia ? It's always fascinated and intrigued me. Any people 'in the know' care to elaborate on that ?

Probably more I-don't-care-what-you-think Unix hacker than psychedelic hippie.

Perhaps it’s both :)

Re: Interview: Larry Wall

#15

Post by bwigfield »

rrss1122 wrote: post #10
melling wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Interesting that 8 points was enough. Well, it's off to the races. People should remember Perl programmers sleep late and live on the West Coast. Nothing before 1pm EST. Let the Perl reminiscing commence. Also, the warning as to why you should never start over. http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/fog0000000069.html

I started out learning Perl. This was when 5.10 was the newest version which was pretty much forever ago. I just went to look up Perl 5.10 release notes, and they billed it as "the first major upgrade... in over five years." http://dev.perl.org/perl5/news/2007/perl-5.10.0.html I would have loved to keep using Perl in a professional setting but even when I first learned it, it was already forever between two major upd…

http://www.dagolden.com/index.php/1757/updated-visualizing-p...

This have gotten much better and perl 5 has great momentum these days. There was sort of a changing of the guard as a lot of the old guys moved on to perl6 or other things. However nowadays there is lots of fresh blood moving the project alone real nice like.

Re: Interview: Larry Wall

#17

Post by hinkley »

cpach wrote: post #13
codeshaman wrote: post #8

I love the shirt he's wearing in those pictures. What is it with geeks and psychedelic/hippie outfits ? Is it because of the patterns and colors, eccentricity or because of real involvement with the counterculture/psychedelia ? It's always fascinated and intrigued me. Any people 'in the know' care to elaborate on that ?

Well he attended UC Berkeley in the 1970s, so it’s safe to assume that he has had lots of exposure to hippie culture. There are actually quite strong connections between computer nerds and the counterculture of the 60s/70s. If you’re curious I recommend the following books: # What the Dormouse Said: How the Sixties Counterculture Shaped the Personal Computer Industry / John Markoff. A great book with many fascinating…

"Two things came out of Berkeley: LSD and Unix. We do not believe this to be a coincidence."

Re: Interview: Larry Wall

#18

Post by petemc_ »

melling wrote: post #7
vezzy-fnord wrote: post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's the mods out with a new feature, see dang's reply here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9864365

Interesting that 8 points was enough. Well, it's off to the races. People should remember Perl programmers sleep late and live on the West Coast. Nothing before 1pm EST. Let the Perl reminiscing commence. Also, the warning as to why you should never start over. http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/fog0000000069.html

There's a reasonable contingent in Japan.

Re: Interview: Larry Wall

#19

Post by fezz »

codeshaman wrote: post #8

I love the shirt he's wearing in those pictures. What is it with geeks and psychedelic/hippie outfits ? Is it because of the patterns and colors, eccentricity or because of real involvement with the counterculture/psychedelia ? It's always fascinated and intrigued me. Any people 'in the know' care to elaborate on that ?

That shirt is a metaphorical representation of Perl's visual style.

Guido van Rossum would wear this shirt: http://1.bp.blogspot.com/_zqFoq3qej2c/SJM4eDsnzII/AAAAAAAAR8...

Re: Interview: Larry Wall

#20

Post by fezz »

codeshaman wrote: post #8

I love the shirt he's wearing in those pictures. What is it with geeks and psychedelic/hippie outfits ? Is it because of the patterns and colors, eccentricity or because of real involvement with the counterculture/psychedelia ? It's always fascinated and intrigued me. Any people 'in the know' care to elaborate on that ?

That shirt is a metaphorical representation of Perl's visual style.

Guido Rossum would wear this shirt: http://1.bp.blogspot.com/_zqFoq3qej2c/SJM4eDsnzII/AAAAAAAAR8...

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