from the desk of stinkpot

heard larry wall, creator and benevolent dictator for life of the perl programming language, speak today.

glad i went.  the first 15 minutes or so was a bizarre stream-of-consciousness race through about 100 1-word slides.  it was both profound and absurd, both celebration and diatribe.  equally fun was seeing MIT in its finest geek culture glory: in a room of approximately 100 programmers, there were maybe 15 women, 30 ponytails, 1 female ponytail, and a clear correlation between beards and BMIs.

real jewels of the talk:

• hearing someone trained in linguistics describe their philosophy to computer language design.  (noticed how he referred to variables as “nouns” and methods as “verbs.”)
• learning that hashes in perl are preceded with the “%” sigil, because the 2 dots in the percentage character are supposed to represent the key and value in a hash.
• hearing “we want perl 6 to be the martha stewart of languages — it’ll do everything everything better than any other language (except get incarcerated).”

Trackback URI | Comments RSS