Interview: Larry Wall • Hacker News Board

Re: Interview: Larry Wall

#101

Post by JadeNB » Wed, Jul 15, 2015, 9:12 PM UTC

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.

I don't like your I-can-use-anything-as-an-adjective attitude.

Re: Interview: Larry Wall

#102

Post by rrauenza » Thu, Jul 16, 2015, 5:43 AM UTC

mirceal wrote: post #37

the man is a legend. Perl was awesome when it first came out. Its time has passed but you can see Perl's influence in many things we use and take for granted today. favorite writing: http://www.wall.org/~larry/pm.html

I was there when he gave that talk in San Jose ... it caught me off guard and made me laugh because he outted how my wife and I met. I'd been intentionally vague with friends, family, and co-workers until then.

Re: Interview: Larry Wall

#103

Post by catwell » Thu, Jul 16, 2015, 7:15 AM UTC

Like several others in this thread, Perl was my first "real" language after POSIX Shell (I started by reading and modifying the early Frozen Bubble sources), and Programming Perl was my first programming book.

That kind of introduction to programming may not be for everyone, but I believe it was instrumental in me making software my career.

I had the privilege to be in the room at FOSDEM when Larry announced Perl 6 for this Christmas. I don't write much Perl those days, but I certainly am going to play with Perl 6. Even if I never write anything useful in it, there are certainly lots of ideas to be taken from that language.

Re: Interview: Larry Wall

#104

Post by pvaldes » Thu, Jul 16, 2015, 10:39 PM UTC

fibo wrote: post #70

eCa wrote: post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

or Catalyst

Re: Interview: Larry Wall

#105

Post by bloblaw » Fri, Jul 17, 2015, 2:20 PM UTC

eliben wrote: post #65

mempko wrote: post #24

I 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?

When I encounter another's Perl code, I run 2 things, (1) Perltidy to reformat the code, and (2) Perl::Critic to identify poor coding practices or insecure code.

https://metacpan.org/pod/distribution/Perl-Tidy/bin/perltidy

http://search.cpan.org/~thaljef/Perl-Critic-1.125/lib/Perl/C...

If you have trouble reading Perl, run those 2 programs and you'll greatly improve its readability.

Re: Interview: Larry Wall

#106

Post by bloblaw » Fri, Jul 17, 2015, 2:38 PM UTC

collyw wrote: post #80

eliben wrote: post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 have seen some bloody awful python code. (Though the worst was still Perl when a bioinformaticain colleague wouldn't even indent it properly.)

Use Perltidy to automatically re-format and indent any "ugly" looking Perl!

https://metacpan.org/pod/distribution/Perl-Tidy/bin/perltidy

Re: Interview: Larry Wall

#107

Post by doug1001 » Fri, Jul 17, 2015, 11:41 PM UTC

mden wrote: post #61

doug1001 wrote: post #40

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/

works for me; in any event, here's the homepage: http://www.wall.org/

LW's blog is behind the first link from the top