State of the Onion 2003
by Larry Wall
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Pages: 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11
I like to please people who did not expect to be pleased. One day when I was a lot younger than I am now, I performed a piece on my violin. A lady came up to me afterward and said, "You know, I don't like the violin. But I liked that."
I treasure that sort of compliment, just as I treasure the email messages that say, "I had given up on computer programming because it wasn't any fun, and then I discovered Perl." That's what I mean when I say we should work to please the people who don't expect to be grateful.
Anyway, back to our Creed here. I can't see anything wrong with the last two lines. In fact, they're directly applicable.
We have done so much for so long with so little
That's Perl 5.
We are now qualified to anything with nothing.
That's Perl 6. I suppose I need to strike that out too, since it doesn't really exist yet, except in our heads.
Well, maybe that's not such a bad outline after all. Let's talk a little more about those things.
We the unwilling
Here in the open source community, we're willing to help out, but that's because we're not willing to put up with the status quo. And that's generally due to our inflated sense of Laziness, Impatience, and Hubris. But then a really funny thing happens. A number of us will get together and agree about something that needs doing because of our Laziness, Impatience, and Hubris, and then we'll start working on that project with a great deal of industriousness, patience, and humility, which seem to be the very opposite qualities to those that motivated us in the first place.
I've tried to figure out a rationale for that, but I've pretty much come to the conclusion that it's not rational or reasonable. It's just who we are. Here's a favorite quotation of mine.
"The reasonable man adapts himself to the world; the unreasonable one persists in trying to adapt the world to himself. Therefore all progress depends on the unreasonable man."
I think that all of us agree that this is true. We just can't always agree on what to be unreasonable about. Of course, this was written by George Bernard Shaw, who had his own ideas of the most reasonable ways to be unreasonable. This is, after all, the guy who wrote Pygmalion, upon which the musical My Fair Lady was based, with dear old 'Enry 'Iggins and Eliza Dolit'le going at each other's throats. And over linguistics of all things. Fancy that.
The only problem with this quote is that it's false. A lot of progress comes from unreasonable women.
Well, okay, maybe Shaw meant "he or she" when he only said "he". Still, if we're going to please unreasonable people in the twenty-first century, maybe we need to rewrite it like this:
On the other hand, some people are impossible to please. We should probably just strike out "George Bernard Shaw" since he's a dead white male.
We the unwilling, led by the unknowing
That's me all over. Which is what the bug said after he hit the windshield.
Or as the bug's friend said, "Bet you don't have the guts to do that again."
Whether I have the guts to do Perl again is another question. My guts are still in sad shape at the moment, according to the doctor...
Anyway, back to "me the unknowing". I admit that there's an awful lot that I don't know. I'd love to tell you how much I don't know, but I don't know that either.
So I'll have to talk about what I know instead. If you are so inclined, you may infer that I am totally oblivious to anything I don't talk about today.
