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
But that's not what happened. Instead, the cabal said, "Yay. We can work this problem from both ends now. Let's give Autrijus all the help we can. Parrot will work bottom-up, and Pugs will work top-down."
Did I say "work"? I meant "play." That's what Ace does best.
But not everyone is an Ace. Some people are naturally sneaky. Every organization needs a second-story man, and people like The Cat prefer to have their fun in private. I strongly suspect certain Perl programmers of being retired jewel thieves. You watch the version tree, and things mysteriously disappear in one place and appear somewhere else. Like a real cat, Le Chat's ego is not involved in any kind of public way. That's not to say that cats don't have egos--just that they don't care whether you notice.
Cats know how to get into and out of places they're not supposed to be able to get into and out of. Cats seem to know how to levitate, and to pass through supposedly impermeable barriers. Even the stupidest cat knows how to make you think they're reading your mind, but it's all a trick.
In Perl culture, Cats also do sneaky things. Sneakiness is a good quality when you're playing Perl golf, for example. Sneaky Perl programmers like to do sneaky things with overloading and with source filters. In fact, Le Chat is looking forward with glee to the day he can change the Perl 6 grammar on the fly and write yet another set of ACME modules. Oh, hi Damian--didn't see you there.
This is Miss Engles. She's a librarian. Like a jewel thief, she also moves things from place to place, but for very different reasons. A jewel thief moves things from where they belong, while a librarian moves things to where they belong. A place for everything, and everything in its place. Miss Engles likes those aspects of Perl 6 that support literate programming, and that let her index the documentation in various ways.
Miss Engles has never cracked a smile because, oddly enough, not cracking a smile is what makes her happy. She is a librarian all the way to the bone. Or that's what she'd like you to believe.
But in fact, as we all know from the movies, librarians take off their glasses and let down their hair when they get off work, and become completely different people. Librarians instinctively understand paradigm shifts, having perused most of the history section in their spare time, not to mention a great deal of the psychology section. So nothing ever surprises a librarian, least of all themselves. If a librarian ever says "I'm shocked," you know they're being completely sarcastic.
Eric has a problem with dyslexia, so he's never going to be a librarian. But that's okay, since he's not terribly interested in the things librarians are interested in. Now, since Miss Engles is officially interested in almost everything, that makes it a little tough for people like Eric, since it forces him to be interested in almost nothing. But that's okay--give him a fishing pole and a tent, and he's happy. Oh, he wouldn't mind a suitcase nuke, either.
