prodigious intellect and a childhood hero of mine. Unfortunately his contribution to web design rarely gets mentioned ( http://www.wall.org/~larry/); no bootstrap--incredible.
For the ease of others (your link is broken):
http://www.wall.org/~larry/
Interview: Larry Wall
61–70 of 107 posts
Re: Interview: Larry Wall
#62I started learning perl 6 to prototype creating a DSL. Holy fucking shit perl grammars and actions are cool.
They are, I can't find Damien Conway's talk from a few years ago, the whole thing seemed so clean and capable. I hope these guys keep trying new things even if it looks like vaporware from a distance.
Re: Interview: Larry Wall
#63Re: Interview: Larry Wall
#64Would I be nuts to pick perl over python as my main scripting/server admin language? I am a postgres, openbsd, data/text processing guy. OpenBSD is 40% perl. Postgres uses perl for its builds. Perl seems to have better text processing capabilities. But it seems to be dying out compared to python.
Perl coders almost certainly tend to skew older than the Python population, if for no other reason than Python is more likely to be taught today and more people are learning programming than twenty years ago. And younger people tend to be louder and more enthusiastic while older people tend to be more tool-for-the-job oriented.
That said, it's not clear what you mean by "picking Perl". Adopting Perl 5 is a distinctly different choice than adopting Perl 6. Considering them as separate languages may be a useful, even if dubious, abstraction.
Re: Interview: Larry Wall
#65I started learning perl 6 to prototype creating a DSL. Holy fucking shit perl grammars and actions are cool.
Yes, but...
Perl's greatest criticism is that it's friggin' unreadable, especially when written by less-than-stellar coders. It's my impression from a skim of Perl 6 that due to a bunch of fairly intricate features added there, it will be come even less readable than Perl 5. Is that a mistaken assessment?
Re: Interview: Larry Wall
#66Earlier quoted context omitted.
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."
Three things came out of Berkeley: LSD, BSD, and the SCA.
Re: Interview: Larry Wall
#67I had to check the year on the article - "He’s the creator of Perl, a programming language that’s widely regarded as the glue holding the internet together " was arguably true in 1999 - 16 years ago.
Think of it as the COBOL of the Internet. Nobody wants to think about it, but it sustains so much .
And by nobody we mean still lots of people who use it and love it. I know I am not alone.
Re: Interview: Larry Wall
#68I started learning perl 6 to prototype creating a DSL. Holy fucking shit perl grammars and actions are cool.
Yes, but... Perl's greatest criticism is that it's friggin' unreadable, especially when written by less-than-stellar coders. It's my impression from a skim of Perl 6 that due to a bunch of fairly intricate features added there, it will be come even less readable than Perl 5. Is that a mistaken assessment?
I used to have trouble reading the Perl5 code I would write a few weeks later. But these were small scripts I'd write and a month or two would go by before I'd right another one.
The issue was I didn't fully know the language. Having spent a few years in Perl 5 now, I no longer have this issue. But the Ruby 1.8 code I wrote 5 years ago I can no longer read, I seem to have forgotten it. I never have been able to read Python, I don't know it either (though I do from time to time dig through their std lib and port some stuff into my modules I author :).
The point is, you can't read a language that you don't know, this is such an old argument. And saying "you can read a language if you don't know it if it is easy enough/designed right", is just well... just keep me away from those languages... Reminds me of a 70 year old retired EE friend of mine. He still buys only chips that come with Basic onboard stating "its so simple, I could never learn any of this new languages", yet what takes him a page of basic, I can do in one line in any modern one... The point is simplicity is just one trait out of many, you can't hang everything on it.
Re: Interview: Larry Wall
#69If anyone cares there was a recorded Larry Wall Q&A session at YAPC a month ago: https://youtu.be/PK9UnAmrxsA?t=12m40s
Re: Interview: Larry Wall
#70I miss Perl. It was the first programming language I learned as a kid. I read the entire Perl for dummies book when I was 14 and uploaded my first script to a "cgi-bin" shortly after. Thanks Larry for your contributions!
If you want to make a web app with modern Perl practices, check out Mojolicious[1] or Dancer[2]. [1] https://metacpan.org/release/Mojolicious [2] https://metacpan.org/release/Dancer
Mojolicious is Great, a flying holy Camel.