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
So if you're new to the department, I'd like to introduce you to a few of the other spooks working for the organization.
The cards for this game list various stats for each character's strengths and weaknesses, as well as their favorite gadget. Now, as it happens, these spies all happen to be Perl programmers as well, so in this talk maybe we'll get to see what their favorite Perl gadgets are.
Ace is the quintessential spy. All the fake spies like James Bond are based on him. And like Bond, Ace is such a good spy that he doesn't care if everyone knows he's a spy. Ace knows he's the hero of the story, and therefore invincible.
So Ace does spying simply because it's fun. That's also why he does Perl programming. He knows it's all just a big game, and it's fun to win with the hand you are dealt. On the other hand, it's also fun to win by changing the rules. It's especially fun if you can win using someone else's money.
You know, when you think about it, most open source software is written using someone else's money. Most Perl programmers are not paid directly to hack on Perl, or Pugs, or on CPAN modules. A lucky few are paid to have fun, but most of us have to make a living some other way, and our bosses kindly let us spend part of our time working on things that are mutually beneficial to the organization and to the world in general. And if we have fun doing that, they don't seem to mind.
But on the flip side, the Aces of the world all seem to know how to create fun wherever they go, or at least they know how to go places where people know how to have fun. For this reason, Ace is one of the most important people in the Perl community.
This last year, we were starting to lose our sense of fun in the Perl community. Though we tried to be careful about not making promises, everyone knew in their hearts that five years is an awfully long time to wait for anything. People were getting tired and discouraged and a little bit dreary.
Then Autrijus Tang showed up. Maybe we should call him "Ace" Tang. He basically said, "Look, we'll never get this done unless we optimize for fun." So fun is exactly what the Pugs project is optimized for. Mind you, Autrijus's idea of fun is to learn Haskell and then write a prototype of Perl 6 in it. Now, for those of you who don't know, Haskell is one of those pure functional languages that doesn't allow any side effects (except, of course, when it does). Really way-out-there stuff, compared to the thinking of the average Perl programmer.
Furthermore, Autrijus thinks it's fun to persuade other functional programmers that it would fun to bootstrap Perl 6 in Haskell. These folks proudly call themselves the "lambdacamels."
But when this happened, a few skeptical people in the Perl community thought they knew what was going to happen next. The cabal would say that this was just too crazy, and we already had Parrot, and why duplicate effort. You know, your basic turf-protection reaction.
