The State of the Onion 9
by Larry Wall
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Pages: 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11
Of course, you should also plan ahead. Where there's one plane, there's likely to be another one coming along after it. And lightning does strike twice in the same place. And, if you see a mushroom cloud, I would suggest that you start replanning your short-term future. And your new future plans should probably take into account not only your future but the future plans of about a million other people who just saw the same mushroom cloud and are suddenly replanning their futures.
Anyway, planning is good. Well, some planning.
Everyone my age and older knows that Five-Year Plans are bad for people, unless of course you're someone like Josef Stalin, in which case they're just bad for other people. All good Americans know that good plans come in four-year increments, because they mostly involve planning to get reelected.
I probably shouldn't point this out, but we've been planning Perl 6 for five years now.
Comrades, here in the People's Republic, the last five years have seen great progress in the science of computer programming. In the next five years, we will not starve nearly so many programmers, except for those we are starving on purpose, and those who will starve accidentally. Comrades, our new five-year mission is to boldly go where no man has gone before! Oh wait, wrong TV show.
You might say that Perl grew out of the Cold War. I've often told the story about how Perl was invented at a secret lab that was working on a secret NSA project, so I won't repeat that here, since it's no secret. Some of you have heard the part about my looking for a good name for Perl, and scanning through /usr/dict/words for every three- and four-letter word with positive connotations. Though offhand, I can't explain how I missed seeing Ruby. So anyway, I ended up with "Pearl" instead.
But it's a little known fact that one of the three-letter names I considered for quite a while was the word "spy." Now, those of you who took in Damian's session on Presentation Aikido are now wondering whether I'm just making this up to make this speech more interesting. And in this particular case, I'm not. You can ask my brother-in-law, who was there. On the other hand, please don't ask him to vouch for anything else in this speech.
But wouldn't "Spy" be a great name to give to a language whose purpose was pattern matching and reporting? Hmm. And spies are also called "agents of change." "Practical extractions are one of our specialties."
Instead of a warn operator, it'd have to be the warn off operator. Instead of having a die operator, we might have had the let die operator. Then we'd get Perl poetry, I mean, Spy poetry, with phrases like live or let die.
How history might have been different! Those of you who are Perl programmers might instead be attending the 9th annual Spy conference. And maybe Ruby would not have been named Ruby, but instead have been named Spook, or Agent. And Python might not have been named after Monty Python, but after some other comedy troupe. It might be called Stooge, or Muppet, or something.
Even if you're not a child of the Cold War, you've been affected. My kids have been affected. Lately my son Aron and my daughter Geneva have been designing a game. No, not a computer game. It's a kind of a board game involving spies and cool gadgets. It's not done yet, so don't pester them over when it's going to be done. At least, don't pester them any more than you pester me about Perl 6. Heh, heh.
But as soon as I saw their cast of characters, I knew I had my theme for this year's talk. For some reason, any time I see a really diverse set of characters, I think of the open source community in general, and the Perl community in specific.
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