State of the Onion 2003
by Larry Wall
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Pages: 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11
Oddly enough, what I'd really like to talk about today is Perl. If we look at our goal for the Parrot project, it looks something like this.
Oops, wrong slide.
That is, Parrot is designed to be a single engine upon which we can run both Perl 5 and Perl 6. And... stuff. Admittedly, this is a rather Perl-centric view of reality, to the extent you can call this reality.
Well, okay, I'll cheat and show you the other stuff we'd like to do.
We'd also like to support, for example, PHP, Ruby, Python, BASIC, Scheme, COBOL, Java, Befunge, TECO, Rebol, REXX, and... I can't quite make out that one on the bottom there. And if I could, I wouldn't say it anyway, because there are children present, and I wouldn't want to fuck up their brains.
Okay, I admit this is not quite reality yet. I just put in all those languages because I'm a white male who is trying to oppress you before I'm quite dead. So I'd better strike out a few things that aren't really there yet.
Could I interest you in a really fast BASIC interpreter?
Well, it's time to move on to our next point.
We the unwilling, led by the unknowing, are doing the impossible.
Is what we're doing really impossible? It's possible. But we won't know till we try. More precisely, till we finish trying. Sometimes things seem impossible to us, but maybe that's just because we're all slackers.
And because we oversimplify.
