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
Perl culture is full of easy-going, straightforward people. Actually, now that I look at it, this looks like Eric O'Reilly, long-lost cousin to Tim O'Reilly. Just kidding. But Tim has always been a straight dealer, and so is Eric, in his own way. I think with Tim it's a matter of choice, but with Eric--well, that's just the way he is.
Eric is the sort of agent you send skiing over the mountain to count enemy soldiers. Pick your term: he's a trooper, or a SEAL, or a Marine. You know he'll almost certainly come back alive, eventually, but you don't quite know in advance whether he'll have to kill all the enemy soldiers in order to count them. What you do know is that if he does, he certainly won't hold it against any of them. Nothing personal. That's just the way it is.
And when he reports in, you'll just get the facts, without much interpretation. Eric doesn't put many comments in his code. He thinks that if you have to comment a piece of code, you haven't written it clearly enough. He is looking forward to working in Perl 6 because a lot of the magical cruft has been cleaned out of the language, or at least moved into places where he doesn't have to worry about it, such as function signatures.
But the thing he loves most about Perl 6 is the multimethod dispatch, precisely because those crufty signatures also allow him to say what he wants without extra words.
Jezebel isn't really a bad girl. She's just drawn that way.
For all we know, this might be Miss Engles on her day off.
That being said, I wouldn't mind it if there more female programmers, especially female Perl programmers. And no, I don't mean it like that, or my wife wouldn't let me say it. But I think we need some spies to tell us what things in our culture appeal to women, and what don't. And it kinda goes without saying that these spies need to be women. Well, look, the guys all have a lot of great ideas, but you know, guys tend to be rather, well, idea-oriented. In theory, Perl culture is supposed to be more cooperative than competitive, but it's kind of hard to argue for that viewpoint when the vast majority of us are standing and pounding our chests like big gorillas. I include myself in that category. Er, the gorilla category, not the Jezebel category. Just thought I'd clear that up.
I think Mama represents the older generation of Perl programmers. Mama is wise to all the stupid tricks of the young'uns, and not afraid to tell 'em off for it. Mama tends to be strict, but she has good reasons for it, because she takes the long view.
A lot of Mamas must hang out on PerlMonks--they're the ones who are always saying "use strict; use warnings;" or you'll grow up to be sorry you didn't. And wipe your feet when you come in.
Mama kinda likes the fact that Perl 6 is growing up to become a strict language by default, but she isn't quite sure what she's gonna do after the kids are all grown up. It makes her happy and sad at the same time.
