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
As the quintessential English banker, Mr. Radcliffe is a firm believer in reliability, with a dash of style. For our talk today, he gets to represent the business interests surrounding open source software. Mr. Radcliffe knows that businesses have different set of goals than most open source programmers, but he also knows that there is a great deal of overlap in those goals, and that the clever businessman can exploit that overlap to the betterment of both business and programmer.
You see, Mr. Radcliffe understands that one thing can have multiple functions. His umbrella is almost certainly multifunctional. Mr. Radcliffe's favorite part of Perl 6 is that nearly every feature is multifunctional, though not completely orthogonal. That doesn't bother Mr. Radcliffe, because nobody who rides cabs around in London expects complete orthogonality. He just expects to get where he's going.
What can I say? Perl is also used by script kiddies. We just hope Oliver doesn't grow up to be a script kiddie like r0u73r. Or if he does, we hope it's just a passing phase.
And in fact, r0u73r used to be a script kiddie, but now uses his 1337 skills for good. To some extent, most of us were cargo culters as we learned how to program. We were reusing code, which is good, but we just didn't always understand why we were reusing the code. But the Perl community has always had a soft spot for cargo culters, and seeks to educate them until they learn the real reasons for things being the way they are. Then they're ready to join the real cult. Er, I mean, the real culture.
Anyway, as a vestige of his former ways, r0u73r looks forward to using the introspection capabilities of Perl 6, particularly when he can introspect someone else's data structures.
Tina seems like a girl who just wants to have fun, but she's really aspiring to be Mata Hari, except for the part about getting caught and executed. As a dancer, and perhaps an actress someday, Tina understands about playing roles. She knows that the role she's currently playing is not who she really is. In Perl 6 terms, she understands the difference between an "isa" relationship and a "does" relationship. So she's very much into the Perl 6 concepts of roles, traits, properties, and mixins.
