OSCON 2008: State of the Onion, by Larry Wall
- Thu Jul 24 2008
- OSCON 2008
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The title of Larry’s talk is “Rules that are meant to be broken”. He says that he’s breaking his rule of giving funny talks, and there’s only one joke in the whole talk, and that wasn’t it.
He wants us to break Perl by coming up with new syntax for it.
People keep asking him “if you had to do it all over again, what would you change?” Two answers: nothing and everything. Perl 6 is the “everything” answer.
In Perl 6 regexes are a sub-language, not strings (as they are in Perl 5). Perl 6’s goal is to be a collection of many languages.
But in Perl culture we’re not told how to think. After all, TMTOWTDI.
Larry proposes that we deal with derived languages sensibly. Instead of copy-and-paste, use polymorphism.
I think I’m losing the plot here, so I’m going to pay attention to the talk now. Sorry!
