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Perl.com: Perl, the postmodern (de)programming lnguage

Speechless. This speech makes me speechless. Larry Wall has a way of talking that really makes me want to se him live. Some day I must do that.

The subject of the speech is insteresting in it self, but Larry Wall adds so many levels of interest that it is silly. Cheap references to his family, jokes based on Star Wars and Star trek (see if you can find the Star Wars reference...), a total jumble of so many things yet he never drops the thread. Amazing.

There is just so much stuff in this talk that makes me think. Excellent read.

I'm here to talk about why Perl and Linux have both been so successful. Note that I'm measuring success here not so much in terms of numbers of users, but in terms of satisfaction of users.

Nowadays people are actually somewhat jaded by the term ``postmodern''. Well, perhaps jaded is an understatement. Nauseated might be more like it. But, anyway, I still distinctly remember the first time I heard it back in the '70s. I think my jaw fell and bounced off the floor several times. To me it was utterly inconceivable that anything could follow modern. Isn't the very idea of ``modern'' always associated with the ideas ``new'' and ``now''? The idea was so inconceivable to me that it took me at least ten seconds to figure it out. Or to think I'd figured it out. As a musician, the pat answer occurred to me almost immediately. I was familiar with the periods of music: Baroque, Classical, Romantic, and Modern. Obviously, if there were to be a period of music following the Modern, it would have to be called something other than Modern. And postmodern is as good a name as any, especially since it's a bit of a joke on the ordinary meaning of modern. Obviously the Modern period was misnamed.

She said, Like, it's all about how you don't have justify everything with a reason anymore. You can just put in stuff because you like it, you know, because it's cool. With Modern stuff you always had to justify everything.

Heidi said, ``You wanna know something really funny. In my IMP class, our class slogan is, 'There's more than one way to do it.''' ``You're kidding,'' I said. (I should also say that that IMP stands for Interactive Math Program, which is a math curriculum in which you sort of learn everything at once. In sort of a postmodern way.) Anyway, I said, ``You're kidding.'' ``No,'' she said, ``That's why IMP is better for math students like me--we learn better when we can see the big picture, and how everything fits in. The old way of learning math never gave you any context''.

'Tsall good. If someone is depressed, we say: 'Tsall good.''' ``But you don't actually think everything is good, do you?'' ``No, of course not.'' ``Are you saying that everything has good elements in it?'' ``No, Dad, I think when we say that, we're saying that, overall, things are good. Like, look at the big picture, don't just focus in on the two or three bad things that are happening to you right now.''

This would bother a Modernist, because a Modernist has to decide whether this is true OR that is true. The Modernist believes in OR more than AND. Postmodernists believe in AND more than OR. In the very postmodern Stephen Sondheim musical, Into the Woods, one of the heroines laments, ``Is it always or, and never and?'' Of course, at the time, she was trying to rationalize an adulterous relationship, so perhaps we'd better drop that example. Well, hey. At least we can use Perl as an example. In Perl, AND has higher precedence than OR does. There you have it. That proves Perl is a postmodern language.

Simple. Wonderful. Greatness. Using the words of Tenacious D: Supreme.

You've all heard the saying: If all you have is a hammer, everything starts to look like a nail. That's actually a Modernistic saying. The postmodern version is: If all you have is duct tape, everything starts to look like a duct. Right. When's the last time you used duct tape on a duct?

perl.com: Perl, the first postmodern computer language (Mar. 09, 1999)

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