Larry Wall On Perl, Religion, and...

Not only did Larry Wall answer your questions, but he said they were excellent questions. You've got to love Larry Wall, not just because he's a nice guy and created Perl, but also because he is the first Slashdot interview guest ever to send his answers preformatted in squeaky-clean HTML. We appreciate this like you wouldn't believe. They're great answers, too -- straightforward, heartfelt, and entertaining. Enjoy!

1) Perl as a "scripting" or a "programming" language
by Marx_Mrvelous

I've been using perl for a very long time, but primarily as a scripting language. I indeed mostly use it for extraction and reporting. With the recent developments in perl, however, there seems to be the trend that perl is able to do much, much more (while retaining compatibility to be "just" a scripting language).

What do you think about how people are using Perl today? Are you satisfied that most people use it for simple tasks like log parsing? Would you like to see more advanced applications being built with Perl verses a compiled language?

A:

I am perfectly happy for Perl to continue parsing logfiles. Perl has always been, and always will be (I hope), a humble language. When I am 80 years old, even if everyone in the whole world puts me on a pedestal and thinks I'm the renaissanciest man that ever lived, I still intend to take out the trash when my wife asks me to. Just because I'm learning Japanese doesn't mean I have to stop speaking English.

But just as people grow (and are stretched), Perl continues to grow (and be stretched). Perl has acquired new skills over the years, and people have been using Perl to do all sorts of things that are arguably at the limits of its capabiliites. The solution to that is not to stop people from doing that, but to increase Perl's dynamic range.

The thing is, people are already building more advanced applications with Perl. But there are some aspects of that process that aren't as easy as they could be. They're hard. In times past we were proud of the fact that the hard things were even possible with Perl5. We often chant the slogan: "Easy things should be easy, and hard things should be possible."

But as with any slogan, there are some qustionable assumptions hidden behind the sentiment. We assume that it's obvious which things should be easy or hard, and that the things that are currently easy are the things that ought to be easy. We assume that making the hard things easy will necessarily cause the easy things to become hard. But sometimes it's not obvious what should be easy or hard. Sometimes the wrong things are easy. And sometimes there are ways to make the hard things easier without making the easy things harder.

Some of the complexity in a Perl5 program is necessary to the solution, and some of it isn't. We can't eliminate the necessary complexity, but we can hope to get rid of some of the needless complexity. That will make everything easier. Well, most everything...

I'm really under no illusions that we can make everything easier at once. There's no such thing as a perfect language. Merely making a more expressive language means it's in some sense more difficult to learn to express yourself responsibly. That's the price of power. Manhattan will always be more difficult to understand than a set of beads.

But in any event, let me assure you that Perl6 will not be as difficult to learn as Japanese. :-)

2) Perl Beginners
by KoopaTroopa

I'm a CS student who's recently become very interested in Perl along with other languages. However, I don't really have too much everyday (or even occasional) need to actually USE much Perl. I am big into learning as much as I can about it for its own sake.

Now, for the question: Given this approach to learning Perl (just for a general working knowledge, maybe light usage,) is it really worth spending a lot of my time learning Perl now, or should I wait for the big Perl6 revision?

A:

I don't think you would be damaged by learning Perl5, though I'm sure there are those who would disagree--or at least choose to be disagreeable.

It really depends on your curiosity level, I think. Some people would learn both Perl5 and Perl6 merely to see how a language design evolves over time. Those folks are pretty hardcore. Count yourself lucky if you're not one of them. But despite appearances, Perl5 isn't a totally horrible language, and we're hoping to save all the good bits of it in Perl6. People moving from Perl5 to Perl6 shouldn't find it too difficult to unlearn the naughty bits, especially since it's the naughty bits that tend to be frustrating. And if you're ever in a situation where you need to use Perl6 for real, it's likely you'll have to deal with legacy Perl5 code anyway. So as usual the answer is: "It depends..."

Gildor was silent for a moment. 'I do not like this news,' he said at last. 'That Gandalf should be late, does not bode well. But it is said: Do not meddle in the affairs of wizards, for they are subtle and quick to anger. The choice is yours: to go or wait.'

'And it is also said,' answered Frodo: 'Go not to the Elves for counsel, for they will say both no and yes.'

'Is it indeed?' laughed Gildor. 'Elves seldom give unguarded advice, for advice is a dangerous gift, even from the wise to the wise, and all courses may run ill. But what would you? You have not told me all concerning yourself; and how then shall I choose better than you? But if you demand advice, I will for friendship's sake give it. I think you should now go at once, without delay; and if Gandalf does not come before you set out, then I also advise this: do not go alone. Take such friends as are trusty and willing. Now you should be grateful, for I do not give this counsel gladly.'

3) Structured programming and perl
by slashnot007

The reason I like perl is it is not a structured programming language. In my work I find it is 50% a get the job done parsing language and 25% sequencer of programs and deamons and 25% major ojbect oriented programming effort often a cgi.

Thus I worry that perl has Python-envy. I've tried to use python several times but always go back to perl. The reason is my daily need for a parser dominates my choice of language and maintains my fluency, since I dont want to have to be fluent in both, perl becomes my language of choice for advanced tasks too, even though python might be better for strcutrued programming.

So my question is, is perl6 making make perl a structued language like python? Would it be a good idea if perl did not develop any further for fear of becoming too complicated and thus disorganized? (witness the evolution of java from clean slate to giant mess with intricate redundant libraries half of which are deprecated).

A:

Er, what do you mean by "structured"? 25 years ago all of these languages would have been considered "structured", in the sense that a block generally has only one entrance point. (There were also people who thought that a block should only have one exit. Thankfully these folks did not prevail, since functions representing decision trees often have one entry but multiple exit points.)

But you obviously mean "structured" in a different sense, or perhaps several different senses. Syntax is structure, and different languages have different syntax, but I don't think that's what you mean.

I'll assume you mean "structured" the way a grade school teacher means it, as in "structured play time", as opposed to "free play time". Python's slogan is "There's only one obvious way to do it." That's fine from the computer's viewpoint, but kinda sucks from the human viewpoint. "You can play any game you like, as long as it was organized by the teacher."

Java was, in that sense, much less structured than Python, I think. That's part of the reason for Java's success, but it came at a price. One of the problems with Java is that they swept a bit too much of the innate complexity of life under the carpet of the libraries. And so now they've had to replace the carpets several times.

So, yes, Java started with a "clean slate", but it was a rather undersized slate, methinks. But as for "structured play time" in Java, the structure has been imposed more by cultural norms than by the language itself.

As for Perl, it has never been "structured" in that sense, though it has always been structured in the sense that you can create as much structure as you like. The whole point is that the structure is optional, not imposed externally. If you're playing with your schoolmates at recess, you can always choose to organize a football game, but the teacher isn't making you do that.

Playing football is like programming in the large. You have to agree on a lot of rules to do it with other people. Perl5 doesn't make it terribly easy to agree on a set of rules, and we hope to make that easier in Perl6. You have to have discipline to do programming in the large, but you'll choose the discipline by turning up the big discipline knob yourself, not by having someone else turn it up for you. Perl6 will give you the big knob.

I am philosophically opposed to turning up the knob for you, because I don't know how fast you want it turned up. (Perl6 will turn it up for you a little by default--if you write a module or class, it'll automatically default to a stricter mode than it uses for your main program.) But the reason I don't like doing it for you is that you know how fast you want to learn, and I don't. As Gildor says, you haven't told me enough about yourself for me to give you advice. If I don't know how hard you can paddle, I can't tell you how big of a wave to try to catch. We all have to start with the small waves.

We find the same problem in teaching reading to kids. Some people shout "Whole language!" while others shout "Phonics!" Well, guess what, they're both oversimplifying. You have to learn some phonics, and then you learn some larger bits based on that, and some larger bits based on that, and eventually you find that you're intuiting whole language. The whole language folks fall into what I call the "Expert Fallacy". You look at how experts do something, and assume that's how everyone should do it. There are some people who are natural readers. They naturally figure out the bits and pieces themselves. But if you try and teach everyone that way, half your kids never figure out the phonics.

Programming is the same way. Language designers tend to look at how experts program and then think that everyone ought to learn to program that way from the start. That's a bit like expecting a new surfer to do well on 40 foot waves. Some will make it, but most will wipe out.

Perl is designed to help people learn the bits of programming they need right now without forcing them to learn the techniques they aren't ready for. But when they are ready for them, Perl tries to be there too. We just don't tell the beginners that the speedometer on their golf cart wraps around several times.

4) What will you *not* put into Perl 6?
by TreyHarris

What would you say has been the number one requested feature that you will not put into Perl6, and why not?

A:

That depends on what you call a feature, and what you call a request. If you look at all the RFCs at dev.perl.org, you'll find that most of the feature requests are bogus on some level or other because they tend to suggest bandaid solutions. Nevertheless, I think it's best to treat them all as a "cry for help". With computer languages, about 75% of the bandaids have a bullet hole underneath.

So, for instance, I officially rejected the RFC asking for multiline comments, while actually accepting the underlying premise that it was too difficult to do block comments. But the better solution is not to introduce more syntax, but to fix the POD syntax to do what people want.

But this is Perl, after all, so there has to be more than one solution. The other solution is to make the Perl grammar malleable enough that the user can install their own multiline comment mechanism anyway via a pragma, so there! That's fine by me, as long as the syntactic warpage is lexically scoped. "All is fair if you predeclare."

Another often-requested feature that's not going into Perl6 is implicit lexical declarations. That's one of those features that seems like a good idea when you're looking at small snippets of code, but it breaks down when the scopes get larger than you can see in a glance. Scoping by indentation has the same problem, but nobody has seriously requested that for Perl6, for some strange reason...

Now you might think that getting rid of the $, @, and % sigils would be the number one requested feature, but typically that is suggested only by people who don't know Perl and probably wouldn't use Perl even if we did get rid of them. The folks who know Perl tend to like the sigils.

5) perl vs other languages
by larry bagina

Whenever perl pops up in slashdot, there are plenty of language zealots claiming perl is obsolete and you should really be using php or ruby or python instead.

What are your thoughts on these other scripting languages? What do you like about them, what do you dislike?

A:

Well, in general, the thing I don't like about other computer languages is that they're not Perl. :-)

Seriously, Perl matches the way I think pretty well, because what I mostly want in a computer language is a wide dynamic range. I want a language in which you can say both dirty, low-level stuff and fancy, high-level stuff. I want a language where both baby-talk and fluency are acceptable. Other computer languages tend to try to level those distinctions.

As for specifics, I must say that the example of Ruby is the main reason I decided against implicit lexical scoping for Perl6. We'll be sticking with explicit my declarations. But I have to like the majority of Ruby simply because that's the part that was borrowed straight out of Perl. :-)

I also liked Ruby's unary splat operator, so I borrowed it for Perl6.

The main problem I see with Ruby is that the Principle of Least Surprise can lead you astray, as it did with implicit lexical scoping. The question is, whose surprise are you pessimizing? Experts are surprised by different things than beginners. People who are trying to grow small programs into large programs are surprised by different things than people who design their programs large to begin with.

For instance, I think it's a violation of the Beginner's Principle of Least Surprise to make everything an object. To a beginner, a number is just a number. A string is a string. They may well be objects as far as the computer is concerned, and it's even fine for experts to treat them as objects. But premature OO is a speed bump in the novice's onramp.

I confess, I have a soft spot in my heart for inside-out languages like PHP. The first real compiler I ever wrote was for a sort of text-processing macro language in which the commands were embedded in the data. This is part of a more general class of programming languages in which a peculiar form of processing is assumed by default, such as the pattern/action syntax of awk that assumes an invisible outer loop.

Perl can do that, but it's not the default. I think languages like awk and PHP hobble themselves in the long run by attaching themselves to a particular ecological niche, particularly when a generalist like Perl can effectively occupy the same niche. So I've never felt tempted to even try PHP. I'd only be speaking second-hand if I said that PHP has some serious namespace and extension mechanism issues. So I won't say that. :-)

Python is cool to look at small bits of, but I think the "outline" syntax breaks down with larger chunks of code. I'm with Aristotle on the structure of discourse--a story should have a beginning, and middle, and an end. So should blocks.

There's something to be said for forcing everyone to code in the same style, but that's not the Perl Way. At least, it's not the default Perl Way. But all is fair if you predeclare. It's perfectly fine for you to import a pragmatic module that enforces a certain style policy. It's even fine if your company forces you to import that pragma. Of course, if you want real programming discipline, I'd suggest you use Damian's Klingon module...

6) Perl and .NET
by prostoalex

What is your opinion of .NET in general and Perl's role in it? Given that .NET supports Perl as one of the languages would you recommend actually using it for any projects? Do you see good future for this tandem?

A:

As far as I'm concerned, .NET is just another architecture that we need to port Perl to run on natively. The current approach to .NET interoperability is a bit of a hack, I think. That is partly Perl's fault for not having a sufficiently powerful type declaration system, but it's also a problem that .NET doesn't really support dynamically typed languages very well. I foresee that we'll have something like a Parrot interface that functions as a (hopefully thin) layer of glue over other VMs such as .NET or Java machines. The less impedence mismatch there is, the thinner the layer can be.

I recommend that you use Perl where it makes sense to use Perl, and avoid using it where it doesn't make sense. I am not the judge of whether it makes sense to use Perl on .NET, simply because I'm way too ignorant and stupid to be making those kinds of decisions for you. Sorry.

As for the future, I really don't know. Long, long ago (when our galaxy was far away) I shoehorned Perl and Java into the same process, and it never aroused much excitement. Certainly the Java folks tend to turn up their noses at non-100% Java solutions, but it got a pretty chilly reception from the other end as well. By and large, Perl programmers don't seem to have much appreciation for Java. I think the language architects who aren't living in reality tend to like multi-language solutions a lot more than ordinary folks do.

Which is, of course, why we're doing exactly the same thing with Parrot. Go figure. :-)

6.5) From a project managers prospective
by mustangdavis

What are your thoughts on the comments made by people that Perl is not designed for projects that require more than one programmer? Many people have stated over and over again that Perl code can not be managed by more than one person ... what are your thoughts on that statement? How would you manage a large Perl project? Do you think Perl should be used for large projects? (or should it be used strictly as a "quick and dirty" programming language?) BTW: I love your work (someone had to say it)

A:

I do not manage any large projects, appearances to the contrary notwithstanding. I haven't an executive bone in my body. All my managerial skills are delegated. Ask anyone I've delegated to...

However, those who claim that Perl code cannot be managed by more than one person are obviously smoking something worse than crack. They're simply ignoring the many examples of people who have done just that. But you wouldn't expect to hire random people off the street to come in and collaborate on writing a novel. You can do it by hiring a few good novelists who already know how to figure out how to work together, or at least how to fight with each other productively. In the absence of that level of expertise, you can also do it by setting up policies under which random people can work, rather like the rules for writing about the world of Liavek, in which, for instance, every story has to mention a camel.

That being said, there are things we can do to make Perl6 better at helping managers and architects set up such policies for programming in the large. Having a standardized opaque object type will help there as well. Nobody is going to claim that Perl6's OO is "bolted on". Well, except maybe for certain Slashdotters who don't know the difference between rational discussion and cheerleading...

7) Role of Religion?
by Anonymous Cowdog

I remember reading at some point that you are a Christian, and there have been suggestions that some of your early missionary impulses (a desire to do good, help others) are perhaps part of the zeal you have put into Perl over the years.

Preferring a scientific view, I am not religious, and have no desire to be. Perhaps there is a God, but if there is, I think he/she has no opposable thumbs; in other words, has no power to change anything; reality is just playing out according to the laws of physics (whatever those are).

Please tell us how in the world a scientific or at least technical mind can believe in God, and what role religion has played in your work on Perl.

A:

Well, hmm, that's a topic for an entire essay, or a book, or a life. But I'll try to keep it short.

When you say "how in the world", I take it to mean that you find it more or less inconceivable that someone with a scientific mind (or at least technical mind, hah!) could chooose to believe in God. I'd like to at least get you to the point where you find it conceivable. I expect a good deal of the problem is that you are busy disbelieving a different God than the one I am busy believing in. In theological discussions more than any other kind, it's easy to talk at right angles and never even realize it.

So let me try to clarify what I mean, and reduce it to as few information bits as possible. A lot of people have a vested interest in making this a lot tougher to swallow than it needs to be, but it's supposed to be simple enough that a child can understand it. It doesn't take great energetic gobs of faith on your part--after all, Jesus said you only have to have faith the size of a mustard seed. So just how big is that, in information theory terms? I think it's just two bits big. Please allow me to qoute a couple "bits" from Hebrews, slightly paraphrased:

You can't please God the way Enoch did without some faith, because those who come to God must (minimally) believe that:
A) God exists, and
B) God is good to people who really look for him.

That's it. The "good news" is so simple that a child can understand it, and so deep that a philosopher can't.

Now, it appears that you're willing to admit the possibility of bit A being a 1, so you're almost halfway there. Or maybe you're a quarter way there on average, if it's a qubit that's still flopping around like Shoedinger's Cat. You're the observer there, not me--unless of course you're dead. :-)

A lot of folks get hung up at point B for various reasons, some logical and some moral, but mostly because of Shroedinger again. People are almost afraid to observe the B qubit because they don't want the wave function to collapse either to a 0 or a 1, since both choices are deemed unpalatable. A lot of people who claim to be agnostics don't take the position so much because they don't know, but because they don't want to know, sometimes desperately so.

Because if it turns out to be a 0, then we really are the slaves of our selfish genes, and there's no basis for morality other than various forms of tribalism.

And because if it turns out to be a 1, then you have swallow a whole bunch of flim-flam that goes with it. Or do you?

Let me admit to you that I came at this from the opposite direction. I grew up in a religious culture, and I had to learn to "unswallow" an awful lot of stuff in order to strip my faith down to these two bits.

I tried to strip it down further, but I couldn't, because God told me: "That's far enough. I already flipped your faith bits to 1, because I'm a better Observer than you are. You are Shroedinger's cat in reverse--you were dead spiritually, but I've already examined the qubits for you, and I think they're both 1. Who are you to disagree with me?"

So, who am I to disagree with God? :-) If he really is the Author of the universe, he's allowed to observe the qubits, and he's probably even allowed to cheat occasionally and force a few bit flips to make it a better story. That's how Authors work. Whether or not they have thumbs...

Once you see the universe from that point of view, many arguments fade into unimportance, such as Hawking's argument that the universe fuzzed into existence at the beginning, and therefore there was no creator. But it's also true that the Lord of the Rings fuzzed into existence, and that doesn't mean it doesn't have a creator. It just means that the creator doesn't create on the same schedule as the creature's.

If God is creating the universe sideways like an Author, then the proper place to look for the effects of that is not at the fuzzy edges, but at the heart of the story. And I am personally convinced that Jesus stands at the heart of the story. The evidence is there if you care to look, and if you don't get distracted by the claims of various people who have various agendas to lead you in every possible direction, and if you don't fall into the trap of looking for a formula rather than looking for God as a person. All human institutions are fallible, and will create a formula for you to determine whether you belong to the tribe or not. Very often these formulas are called doctrines and traditions and such, and there is some value in them, as there is some value in any human culture. But they all kind of miss the point.

"Systematic theology" is an oxymoron. God is not a system. Christians are fond of asking: "What would Jesus do in this situation?" Unfortunately, they very rarely come up with the correct answer, which is: "Something unexpected!" If the Creator really did write himself into his own story, that's what we ought to expect to see. Creative solutions.

And this creativity is intended to be transitive. We are expected to be creative. And we're expected to help others be creative.

And that leads us back (finally) to the last part of your question, how all this relates to Perl.

Perl is obviously my attempt to help other people be creative. In my little way, I'm sneakily helping people understand a bit more about the sort of people God likes.

Going further, we have the notion that a narrative should be defined by its heart and not by its borders. That ties in with my linguistic notions that things ought to be defined by prototype rather than by formula. It ties in to my refusal to define who is or is not a "good" Perl programmer, or who exactly is or isn't a member of the "Perl community". These things are all defined by their centers, not by their peripheries.

The philosophy of TMTOWTDI ("There's more than one way to do it.") is a direct result of observing that the Author of the universe is humble, and chooses to exercise control in subtle rather than in heavy-handed ways. The universe doesn't come with enforced style guidelines. Creative people will develop style on their own. Those are the sort of people that will make heaven a nice place.

And finally, there is the underlying conviction that, if you define both science and religion from their true centers, they cannot be in confict. So despite all the "religiosity" of Perl culture, we also believe in the benefits of computer science. I didn't put lexicals and closures into Perl5 just because I thought people would start jumping up and down and shouting "Hallelujah!" (Which happens, but that's not why I did it.)

And now let's all sing hymn #42...

8) Thanks Larry
by wdr1

Like many others, I love Perl. I use it both professionally and personally. You've not only helped make my career, but also given me a very pleasent past-time. I was wondering what I can do to say thank-you? Can we give you money? Dontate something to someone, etc.?

When the new Programming Perl came out, I didn't really need anymoe (viva perldoc!), but wanted to make sure I was putting a few bucks in the pockets of those who made Perl great. What else can I do to say thanks?

A:

Hmm, what timing! You must be from one of those churches where they pass the offering plate right after the sermon... :-)

Even just saying thanks is much appreciated. But if you want to help out more, there are lots of places to donate time or money. Unfortunately, it takes time to figure out how to donate time, since you have to hang out with various interest groups until you get, er, interested in one of them. But it's part of Perl culture to value contributions to Perl culture, so don't hold back just because your contribution is not somehow technical. That's not how we work.

Donating money is easy (except, of course, for the money part). Tax-deductible contributions can be made to the Perl Foundation. Much of my support for this year has come through the Perl Foundation--my full-time work on the Apocalypses would have been impossible without it. If you can persuade the companies you work for to make donations or to match your donations, that's also a worthwhile investment of time (and in some cases, agony). Please allow me to express my sincere gratitude here for everyone who has contributed already. This program is made possible by viewers like you.

9) perl 6 niche
by maraist

perl 1-5 have been great UNIX configuration/management languages. This includes small-scale webserver platforms. It's very difficult to find any other language that is as versitile in this respect where it reigns in it's niche. It is the perfect combination of speed, power, simplicity and huffman encoding (especially given the co-UNIX-tools look-and-feel).

Perl6 on the other hand, changes this formula around; favoring a more general solution that potentially reduces performance (due to abstractions), and deviates substantially from the UNIX-family-syntax - Namely: c-ish-syntax ( colon, question mark, select, exception-handling, etc), awk/sedish reg-ex's, raw c-libray-wrappers, etc. It was these very similarities that made learning and accepting perl so trivial since learning CIS and UNIX administration was sufficient to master perl in 2 days.

My question is: does perl6 have a niche in mind? Or is it spreading itself too thinly; competing more and more against Java/python/C# and thus losing it's identifiable niche?

A:

Excellent question. I love the evolutionary biologists' way of talking about organisms as if they're evolving on purpose: "I think I'll develop feathers now and become a bird...", though in Perl's case, of course, there is some amount of purpose in my head (some would say "not enough"), not to mention the heads of other Perl developers (some would say "too much" (or is it the other way around?)), but it's still great fun to talk about Perl as if it were its own beastie, or as if it were a character in a novel that runs away with the plot despite the intentions of the author, kinda like this sentence has.

Anyway, from the start, Perl has never really been satisfied with staying in any one particular ecological niche. That's not terribly healthy approach in evolutionary terms, especially when your niche goes away. Perl's been pretty lucky so far to land in stable niches, but if some of its current niches dry up someday, that's really only to be expected, and indeed almost hoped for. It's probably the fault of closing ecological niches that we aren't all still swinging from trees, after all. (Of course, some of us still are, but that portion of us isn't heavily represented on Slashdot. Er...appearances to the contrary notwithstanding.)

Perl started out as just a text processing language--a better awk and sed--but it very rapidly spread to the ecological niche of system administration. On Unix, at least, a lot of system administration is text processing. With version3, however, Perl very intentionally escaped the text-processing-only niche by adding the capability to process binary data. Perl4 UNintentionally spread from the sysadmin niche into the CGI/Web niche. Perl5 accellerated that trend by intentionally occupying the extensible-glue-language niche, which had the unforeseen (by me) but predictable result of enabling Web sites to hook all their backend databases to the various textual Internet protocols.

But if you're worried about Perl trying to inhabit the "good for everything" niche, that's actually been Perl's intention since Perl5 came out. After all, you can't add OO to any language without making it perfect. ;-)

Seriously, I think that, for many of the people who use Perl today, the ecological niche they're thinking of is already labeled "everything", even if it isn't quite. For those folks, trying to make Perl better for the "everything" niche is not really an issue--they're already panting for it. These are the people who will actually carry Perl over to the next ecological niche it spills into, and the ones after that. I just made Perl a glue language, and other people applied it to bootstrapping the Web. Making Perl the best tool for growing programs from small to large is actually one of the underlying design goals of Perl6. But other people will use that to inhabit, or even create, other ecological niches. I hope to be surprised again as I was with the Web. I could, of course, be completely wrong.

10) How to get people to take Perl seriously
by kin_korn_karn

I'm a perl programmer who uses it daily. The push is on from the C?O types to get rid of Perl, even though a bunch of us here know it and are very proficient and fast with it. The new standard is Java with web services and all that other BS. This sickens me, because a) I'm biased towards Perl and b) I know Java is simply a fad language and the overhead/infrastructure only serves to give do-nothing architect types jobs.

The high-level technical people in my company don't take Perl seriously. They see it as some kind of super-Awk or an artifact of the early days of the web. Smart people know better, but we're not in charge.

What do you think it would take to get people to take Perl seriously as a programming language [again]? Is widespread use of Perl a goal of yours, or do you not care?

A:

Well, if Java really is a "fad" language, we don't have to do anything to beat it, now do we? :-)

Leaving that aside, my goal is (and has always been) for Perl to be as useful as possible. It naturally follows that if people are avoiding Perl for artificial reasons, Perl is not being as useful as possible. So there's a place for advocacy. It is an unfortunate fact that, human nature being what it is, an ounce of cheerleading often beats a pound of rational discussion.

However, my job is not to lead cheers, but to make sure that Perl is designed to be maximally useful. It has never been a direct goal of mine to be "taken seriously". For good or ill, I am composed of far more levity than gravity. And I'm afraid some of that rubs off on Perl, too. But if Perl is everything it ought to be, it will naturally attract serious attention over the long term. If ecological niches are natural, and if nature abhors a vacuum, it follows that ecological niches abhor vacuums too. I expect to hear some great sucking sounds over the next ten or twenty years.

It is hardly easy...

[arglesnaf]

...to understandly what Larry said, would it be hard to restate it more easily? Or is it easily understood that Larry should be hard to understand?

Re:It is hardly easy...

[nucal]

Once you become the renaissanciest man that ever lived you will understand.

Re:It is hardly easy...

[twoshortplanks]

Normally Damian Conway does a set of code examples based on what Larry's been saying. Maybe we could get him to do one for slashdot...

Seriously, if you want some explanation of what's been said then I can recommend:

• Programming Perl

  Larry and friends explaining about Perl 5. Big book, but nice and easy with lots of explanation about why things are done the way they are

• The Perl 6 list

  People asking questions about how Perl 6 will work, what's the changes are going to be, what's been written so far. There's a good summary on perl.com that's written once a week

• The Apocalypses and Exegsis

  How Perl 6 is changing from Perl 5 written by Larry and Damian. Also on perl.com.

• The Perl Beginners list

  High traffic, but good. From the lists page: http://lists.perl.org/ [perl.org]

(side note: Why doesn't slashcode let me do definition lists in HTML?)

Re:It is hardly easy...

[jamieo]

Understanding what Larry says is as easy as understanding perl...

I'm sure everyone can understand that statement. ;)

Jamie

HTML formatting

[Anonymous Coward]

I bet he wrote a nice perl script to do it for him.

odd

[glwtta]

I found the first question to be rather strange, maybe because of where it is to be found:

http://interviews.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=02/0 9/06/1343222&mode=nocomment&tid=145

Larry sure knows how to coin a phrase...

[stu_ajh]

"Perl 6 will give you the big knob."

Re:Larry sure knows how to coin a phrase...

[Pig Hogger]

Or they'll flock to Perl 6 dudes...

Re:Larry sure knows how to coin a phrase...

[Casca]

What makes you think the female Perl developers out there don't like getting "the big knob"?

Hmmm...

[Dirtside]

Larry Wall on Perl, Religion, and...

So, basically, he's talking about the same thing twice? ;)

Re:Hmmm...

[dystrophy]

From the Christian perspective...

God is Omnipotent, Omnipresent, but NOT Omni-controlling. Bad stuff happens to good people because we're not preprogrammed to a set of only good behaviors. We have free will that affects us and others. That doesn't stop the fact that He (God) loves us, and is willing to forgive us in the case where we make life changing decision(s) and turn away from that (and other) wrong.

I thought Larry did a wonderful job of distilling the Bible into two bits. If more pastors, priests, and normal Christians had as simple and life changing a belief, a lot of the ugliness between each other (inter-Church), and other belief systems (Christian vs. neo-paganism or atheism) would be resolved. Agreeing with others outside of your personal views is definitely not required in Christianity, but loving them is.

Given the condition that the two bits that Larry proposed are set, I believe that two more bits are in order. Whereas the previous two bits relied on God to view and set them, these two are set by your response to God:

A) Love God with everying you are
B) Love the people around you like you love yourself

These two bits, when set, change your life.

-darren

Re:Hmmm...

[Erore]

If you want to combine this discussion of free will and the writings of JRR Tolkien, read chapter 2 of the Silmarillion.

You'll see that it is a story about free will. Free will for the dwarves, free will for Aule. Parallels to the Bible as explanations of why God created us and gave us free will, as well as the free will choice of Abraham to "begat" Ishmael, to "begat" Islam, to "begat" future conflict between the Jewish and Islamic people. (I'm not trying to start any flame wars here about the Jewish and Islamic faiths, I'm trying to show how the choice of one man led to some pretty big things years later.)

Free will "begat" an awful lot of future strife in both the Silmarillion and the Bible-real life. But, that free will never altered God's perfect plans for his creation. Which is exactly what the opening sequence, called Ainulindale, of the Silmarillion is all about.

"...and often strife will arise between thine and mine; the children of my adoption and the children of my choice."

Re:Hmmm...

[Jason Earl]

I have a three-year-old daughter. Now, I could duct-tape her to a wall in her bedroom and guarantee that she never did anything that I didn't want her to do. However, that isn't my goal as a parent. Instead I allow her to use her free agency to learn and grow.

In other words, your problem is that you misunderstand God's purpose. We aren't here because God was bored and wanted a really fancy electric train set. We are here because God loves us, and he wants us to learn and grow. God could, if he wanted to, control our actions, and even our thoughts, but instead he has given us the ability to make choices for ourselves. What you do with that ability is up to you.

Re:Hmmm...

[J. J. Ramsey]

"Where is the evidence that Larry talks about? It's there if I care to look, but surely that's all in history?"

My guess is that the evidence that Larry Wall is referring to assorted evidence of the historicity of the New Testament (NT), such as having a lot of early manuscripts, or archaeological evidence showing that certain people mentioned in the NT actually existed, etc. If you really want to look, there are several books on the topic.

And yes, it is "all in history," but it's still evidence, for good or for bad.

"If my life changes I want it to be for a reason other than I felt like believing in something that was nice"

Fair enough.

Only Larry Wall...

[billstr78]

... Could tie in quantum physics to an answer regarding his beliefs in God. Genius.

Re:Only Larry Wall...

[MAXOMENOS]

I've seen at least two separate Jesuits do this.

Re:Only Larry Wall...

[Golias]

In other words, only somebody with marginal knowledge of theology would think Larry Wall was the only one to approach the discussion in this manner.

The apostle Paul was once praised as being "all things to all people" because he emersed himself into a culture before he began ministry in it. That way, when he spoke to the people about God, he spoke in terms that they could both understand and relate to. Tech geeks can relate to poisoning hypothetical cats to demonstrate quantum theories, so using that to make his point is really just following Paul's example.

scientists' belief in gods

[Ravagin]

Please tell us how in the world a scientific or at least technical mind can believe in God, and what role religion has played in your work on Perl.

I missed the original discussion in which all these questions were collected, but yowza, that's a dense question (no offense to the inquirer!).

I am not religious either - faith is simply not in me, I cannot believe in something I cannot see - so I see where the inquirer is coming from, but as Larry puts it, the question is talking at right angles.

To say "you're a scientist, how can you believe in God?" makes the automatic and ignorant assumption that said scientist believes said god created the world in thirty days, wrought man from the testicles of a gopher, and causes the sun to rise every day by means of ropes and pulleys (or something of the like - you get my point).

Larry may be a Christian, but though there may be many irrational/ignorant/intolerant Christians in the world, not all Christians are like that. As a friend of mine says, the attitude that they are "puts the asshole in atheist."

Being religious does not preclude being a smart and talented scientist. Sorry if this is a bit OT, but I'm kind of fed up with the attitude that "belief in god(s)" == "irrational and stupid." And though he has in no way convinced me, I'm quite impressed with Larry's defense of his faith.

Re:scientists' belief in gods

[billstr78]

I am an athiest as well for many similar reasons. I used to wonder how anyone who questioned anything could ever believe in the traditional Catholic or Christian view of God. Now and especially after reading this article, it apears to me that one does not have to believe in thier God to believe in the teachings of the bible as a collection of stories passed on from generation to generation that help us mortal humans make sence of a world we cannot ultimatley control.

So if control is in the hands of the laws of Physics (as the question posed), God, Buhdda, the Dali Lamma or who/what/ever, it does not really matter as long as you know that you are not it. It is feasibly scientific to believe that Perl is God! I mean it is what is conrolling SlashCode after all.

Re:scientists' belief in gods

[totallygeek]

Remember, too, that scientists have been ridiculed by other scientists throughout history. Germs? Something you cannot see that makes you ill? Have anti-septic surgery?

The atom looks like pudding? The atom cannot be made of any smaller particles. Splitting an atom wouldn't make much energy.

Fly?

Go to the moon?

More examples? And, as far as having to see something to believe -- have you travelled to every continent or just taken someone's word that those places exist? Are you sure there are other galaxies? Have you even seen Pluto? Can you "see" microwave radiation or a single atom?

I am not faithful either, but cut the faithful some slack. Their beliefs are just as strong as our non-belief. Let's at least be good-hearted athiests.

Re:scientists' belief in gods

[disappear]

The difference is, Scientists will eventually admit they were wrong and their "beliefs" will morph and change over time based on evidence.

This happens surprisingly infrequently with individual scientists. What tends to happen is that the scientists who don't believe the new, well-supported evidence (or its interpretation) retire or die.

This is one of Kuhn's basic points.

Re:scientists' belief in gods

[revscat]

Are you suggesting that Catholics from the Middle Ages hold all the same beliefs as modern day Baptists?

Fundamentally, Catholicism has changed very little over the centuries. The same can be said of most religions. Catholicism, for instance, has always believed that it is the true and holy Church spoken of in the scriptures, that priests are emissaries of god, and that the Pope is God's voice on earth. Even more fundamentally, they believe that Jesus is the son of God and that He will one day return to Earth. Things such as this have not changed and probably never will, because they are what define the religion and make it what it is.

No one is claiming that superficial changes have not occured. But core beliefs have been known to change in the realm of science, and certainly more frequently than such beliefs change in religion.

Some people think they are the only ones who are right, and all others are wrong. But this is not exclusive to religion or any other group for that matter.

Absolutely right. Everyone believes that their way is the One True Way, and that if everyone else just believed like they do then the world would be perfect. Science, done properly, recognizes this inherent desire in man and takes it into account. "You might believe it," the voice of Science says, "but you must prove using a certain set of criteria for it to be accepted in our community."

Re:scientists' belief in gods

[J. J. Ramsey]

"I cannot believe in something I cannot see"

I'd be a little careful about that statement. I'm sure that you believe that atoms exist, even though you cannot see them. Of course, it is absolutely silly to say that because you believe atoms exist that you should also believe that God exists. However, you might wish to reexamine what you really mean when you say "cannot see."

Re:scientists' belief in gods

[Soko]

Stop being pendantic and splitting hairs.

The existance of atoms and quanta can be proven with mathematics (besides scientific observation) - they can be "seen" when you use the language of science. I know of no mathematical formula or scientific experimant that _proves_ the exisitance of God - so He truly is "un-seeable" (in the context of the physical world, anyway).

Belief in a Higher Power is (or should be, anyhow) a matter of faith and personal choice, nothing else, IMHO.

Soko

Re:Give me a break, Mr. Logic

[Rick_T]

> At one time, every observation thought of proved
> that the world was flat. To state that science
> today is infallable is absolutely retarded.

This is a strawman argument.

Nobody - let me repeat, NOBODY - who knows anything about science will say that it is infallible. The whole POINT of the scientific method is that humands *do* make mistakes. If all our observations and conjectures were perfect, we wouldn't need the scentific method at all.

(Does it surprise anyone that *religions* have claimed "infallibility"? :) )

The difference between science now and science then is that we have a *lot* more observations under our belts and new tools for observations. The scientific method is the same.

> Saying that "scientific studies prove atoms
> exist but the Bible doesn't prove squat" is a
> fallacy, plain and simple.

What, exactly, does the Bible prove? This is a pretty reasonable question to ask, I think.

> Theologists study the Bible, trying to find
> coheasion. When they find something that
> doesn't make sense, they try and come up with
> an explaination for it. Many "scientists"
> call this proof that God does not exist.

That's a little strong, but it does tend to give fundamentalists the shivers. After all, the argument goes, why is an infallible, perfect, omniscient god's word so darned hard to read? For that matter, why are his products (us) so defective?

> The same goes for science. Theories arise to
> explain things that we're not sure about.
> They're not always right.
> Pot. Kettle. Black.

Not quite. Scientists *know* that most new hypothesis are, if not flat-out wrong, in need of improvement. That's what the scientific method is all about.

Religion and science approach the problem from two different directions. The scientific approach is to observe, then try to come up with an explanation that fits the facts. If the facts go against the explanations, the facts must change.

The more "fundamentalist" religions work a different way: An explanation is presupposed. The "facts" are manipulated so they fit the explanation - or the explanation is so vague that any "fact" would fit. (Okay, that's a bit uncharitable - some religions DO change their dogma - but it's not far off from fundamentalist Christianity.)

Back to Larry Wall ... his argument for his religion, quantum mechanics metaphors aside, basically boils down to "I believe because I believe". And that's perfectly all right. It's not *logical*, but then again that's the whole POINT of faith. :)

Re:scientists' belief in gods

[mmaddox]

I must agree. This is one of the most intelligent, enlightened defenses of faith that I have ever seen. And without the taint of superficial holiness that so many Christians add to the mix.

As an atheist, I must say, "Bravo."

Of some additional interest, you might like the following books, by an acquaintance of mine (one of the most intelligent men I have ever met):

• The Reluctant Prophets: Has Science Found God?
• COSMOS AND CONSCIOUSNESS: Quantum Computers, SuperStrings, Mysticism, C++ Programming, Egypt, Quarks, Mind-Body Problem, Aliens, Linguistics, and Turing Machines

Both by Stephen Blaha, Ph.D. and available at 1st Books [1stbooks.com].

Re:scientists' belief in gods

[zulux]

I'm in the same boat - I don't beleive in a "God."

However if there is a "God" then I know two things about him/her/it:

God has a sense of humor: See Lemeurs, Spam and 42 for evidence.
If were made in the image of God, then God would prefer doubting inteligent people, to dumb people with blind faith. Good things happen to doubting inteligent people, while dumb people have a rough time of it - they tend to get killed, maimed and taken advantage of.

So have fun, be smart and if there is a God - let's hope this is a some sort of pratical joke. Making us in the form of giant hairless monkeys is rather amusing when you think on it.

Re:scientists' belief in gods

[Tackhead]

> God has a sense of humor: See Lemeurs, Spam and 42 for evidence.
>
> If were made in the image of God, then God would prefer doubting inteligent people, to dumb people with blind faith. Good things happen to doubting inteligent people, while dumb people have a rough time of it - they tend to get killed, maimed and taken advantage of.

Agreed on your first point. Disagree on the second point. Smart creative people get whacked just as much as dumb fsckwits.

Then again, my two favorite books in the Bible are Ecclesiastes and Job. Both of which...

> So have fun, be smart and if there is a God - let's hope this is a some sort of pratical joke. Making us in the form of giant hairless monkeys is rather amusing when you think on it.

...provide a sound Scriptural basis for your conclusion. So welcome to the True Faith, Brother :-)

On a more enlightening angle, allow me to quote Carl Sagan (atheist):

How is it that hardly any major religion has looked at science and concluded, 'This is better than we thought! The Universe is much bigger than our prophets said, grander, more subtle, more elegant'? Instead they say, 'No, no, no! My god is a little god, and I want him to stay that way.' A religion, old or new, that stressed the magnificence of the Universe as revealed by modern science might be able to draw forth reserves of reverence and awe hardly tapped by the conventional faiths."

- Carl Sagan

The God worshipped by Islamokazi nutbags and Creationist fundies is of little interest in me. He may have created us in His image - but some of his less-than-clued followers have unfortunately returned the favor :(

The Islamokazis (and to a lesser extent the Roman Catholic Church) re-created him in the form of a celestial slot machine ("insert [ 767 | money ], pull lever, get [ 72 virgins | indulgences ]"), and the Christian fundie hucksters re-created him in the form of a carnival barker ("I whipped it up in a week six thousand years ago and hid different ratios of potassium and argon isotopes in the dinosaur bones just to confuse their scientists 6000 years later! Suckerrrrz!").

But a God who can come up with an entire universe based on a few fundamental constants and some deep mathematics, such that out of that universe, a few bits of carbon compounds might emerge into sentient life capable of looking around at the universe and trying to unravel the math for themselves... That's the kind of God that might be worth getting to know more about.

Re:scientists' belief in gods

[zulux]

Obviously you of the later catagory that I mentioned: It would take a stupid person to fail to notice that smart people (as a general rule) have more fun, income, creativity and joy. It also take a stupid person, such a yourself, to put words into other people mouths in such an inept and wrong way.

Re:scientists' belief in gods

[teamhasnoi]

I am not religious either - faith is simply not in me, I cannot believe in something I cannot see...

I just need to ask: Are you gasping for breath right now? Unless you live in L.A., I would think you can't see the air that you're breathing.

On a more serious note: What about Love? There is something that is completely intangible. Sure, you can break it down to chemical reactions and nerve impulses, but that is not the sum of it's parts.

God help you if you go blind. ;)

Re:scientists' belief in gods

[cwernli]

I cannot believe in something I cannot see

That reminds me of two stories:

1. A Swiss band once had a song with the title "America doesn't exist", describing how Columbus didn't believe in his own theory, therefore didn't board the ship but hid in Spain instead, just to come out of the bush when the ships returned. Everybody patted him on the back for having discovered America, only that he himself was feeling terribly uneasy because he couldn't possibly ask anybody if America really existed. The conclusion is that the singer himself doubts Americas existence because lots of people claim to have been there, but how do you verify it ?
2. Then there's the anecdote Stephen Hawking tells in one of his book: at a conference an old lady ferociously refuses to accept that the Earth is a globe, stating that it's obvious that the Earth's flat and resting on a tortoise (which btw accounts for the earthquakes). Asked where the tortoise's standing, she replies "on another tortoise of course!", to which the physicist didn't really have an answer.

As much as I like your statement, the inherent danger is (forced) ignorance: most of todays knowledge has been derived, either from other knowledge or taken from other people. Do you verify the entries in an encyclopedia ? Did you verify yourself that the earth circles the sun or do you believe otherwise ?

I have the impression that you actually wanted to say "I believe only in stuff which has been proven by a reliable source, which brings us back to square one.

Re:scientists' belief in gods

[Our Man In Redmond]

2. Then there's the anecdote Stephen Hawking tells in one of his book: at a conference an old lady ferociously refuses to accept that the Earth is a globe, stating that it's obvious that the Earth's flat and resting on a tortoise (which btw accounts for the earthquakes). Asked where the tortoise's standing, she replies "on another tortoise of course!", to which the physicist didn't really have an answer.

I don't remember Hawking telling this story, but I do remember an extension of a similar story:

Physicist: So you say the tortoise is standing on the back of another tortoise?

Woman: That's right.

Physicist: Well, what is that tortoise standing on?

Woman: You can't get past me that easily, young man. It's tortoises all the way down.

Extraordinary Claims....

[copponex]

Yes, we've all heard it before, but "extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence."

So, if Bob tells me that he went to China, and people there ate kittens, I would say "interesting." If Bob instead claimed that they flew using the powers of ESP and a shaman, I would want video to say the least - and lots of it from multiple angles.

So, what I usually ask is "can I see a picture of it?" China? I've seen pictures, video, and heard audio. Australia? Hey, I've met Austrialians. They seem to really live on that continent.

God? So far, no picture, no conversation, and nothing that makes me believe that "it" has existed.

Lastly, from the interview:

then we really are the slaves of our selfish genes, and there's no basis for morality other than various forms of tribalism.

This is true - but Christian morality is derived from Jewish morality, and I have not been impressed with their morality as found in the Old Testament. To me, it's entirely ethnocentric, and you don't need to read too much of it before you catch on to the coincidence of an ethnic group that worships a God that "chose" them.

-Dean

PS I'm still curious as to the exact scripture that released Christians from observing the same Laws as the Jews. When did God change his mind, and why?

Re:Impressed with his defense?

[ArthurDent]

While I agree that the quantum references may have been a bit stretched, I was able to understand them having only taken high school chemistry, and we're all geeks here right? ;-)

OTOH, I happen to agree with his views, so it may have been easier for me to decipher.

I always gringe whenever the faithful try to wrap themselves in the cloak of science. I believe that science and religion should be separate.

Sorry, but they cannot be seperated for those of us who believe. You see, if you believe in a Creator, (which I understand that you may not) you then have to accept that that Creator made the things that science "discovers". Therefore, we are only stumbling upon the complexities of creation with our science. There will always be more to discover because our Creator is greater than ourselves. Each time we do "discover" something, it is a new opportunity to praise God for the complexities and intricacies of His creation.

I don't mean to try to shove any belief in particular down your throat. I'm just trying (perhaps in vain) to explain why science and religion are inseperable for those who believe.

Ben

I didn't explain that well

[GuyMannDude]

I'm just trying (perhaps in vain) to explain why science and religion are inseperable for those who believe.

Okay, I understand the confusion. What I meant to say was that I think the methods of science are not applicable to questions of theology. Likewise, I don't think religion should try to answer questions that are (at least potentially) explainable by science. I object to having creationism taught in schools because there is already a very solid scientific explanation for the development of life on this planet. However, I don't have a problem with people stating that the Big Bang was initiated by God. Or even the idea that God is conducting an infinite set of parallel experiments in the multiverse theory. And the existance of God is, of course, well outside the reach of science.

When Larry Wall describes his faith in terms of quantum mechanics, I find that silly and misleading. It attempts to coat his non-verifiable beliefs with the lacquer of science. Just say you believe and leave it at that. No need for references to theoretical physics.

GMD

Re:scientists' belief in gods

[Ravagin]

I disagree. I am a journalism nut, but that doesn't mean I don't editorialize in everyday conversation.

Faith is something that doesn't have evidence or rational explanation! Trying to prove a god is inherently impossible, because gods are things of faith.

Re:scientists' belief in gods

[Tackhead]

> I disagree. To me "you're a scientist, how can you believe in God?" means "you believe in the scientific method; if God's existence is your hypothesis, where is your experimental evidence?".

Understated answer: "I have insufficient data to prove my hypothesis at this time."

Better answer: "...but if my math were better, I'd understand quantum gravity. Might tell me more about how this 'universe' thing was built."

Best answer: "...and once I get quantum gravity figured out, I'll probably have even more questions to ask. I'm happy to keep asking questions until I find something incontrovertible, like a fundamental particle based on vibrations of strings that spell out 'I apologize for the inconvenience -- JHVH-1' with each letter being about Planck length square."

If God exists, I believe science is the game we play with Him (or is it the other way around? :-) to find out what His rules are.

Another notable Christian

[int69h]

Let's not forget everyones hero, Don Knuth. He's a devout Christian as well.

Re:Another notable Christian

[uhoreg]

How could you write that without posting a relevant [stanford.edu] link [stanford.edu]?

Anyways, to those in graph theory who know about partial k-trees/tree-width, Hans Bodlaender [cs.uu.nl] is also a Christian. He has his own answer [cs.uu.nl] to the question Anonymous Cowdog asked. (Well, a similar question.)

Re:Another notable Christian

[Longinus]

Let's not forget J.R.R. Tolkien and C.S. Lewis.
Not exactly hackers, but staples of any geek's diet.

Good point on PHP

[Ars-Fartsica]

Larry is correct to point out that anything PHP can do...you can do with perl (mod_perl)...often better, and still keep the language you use for everything else. In this sense the rise of PHP has mystified me.

Why the need for a novel language to do web scripting? The only argument I can see is ease of installation and learning, but those aren't good reasons for serious developers.

Re:Good point on PHP

[Ravagin]

I don't know - if I all I need to do is check some cookies and output a stylesheet based on those cookies, or dip into a database and sort and output some data, why do I need perl? I can do it quickly and painlessly in my page with PHP. No need to go around insulting those of us who use it as "unserious."

I see perl's coolness, but just to play contrary deity's advocate with you... why not PHP? :)

Re:Good point on PHP

[twoshortplanks]

Personally? Because I find that PHP is too powerful for an embedded language. You end up with this large chunks of code in the middle of your HTML making it really hard to maintain.

Give me a simple language like the Template Toolkit that can connect to a more powerful language (er, Perl) to do the difficult stuff any day.

Of course, you may disagree, and you're not stupid or evil for doing it. You just have a different point of view...I'm certainly not going to start bashing PHP.

Of course, wat I'm really waiting for is Parrot to be completed, both with the ability to run Perl 6 and PHP generated bytecode, so we can both use whatever we want, call each other's code all over the place, and play nice together...

Re:Good point on PHP

[lamz]

Personally? Because I find that PHP is too powerful for an embedded language. You end up with this large chunks of code in the middle of your HTML making it really hard to maintain.

So don't put large chunks of code in the middle of your HTML. Sock the code away in another file and just call it where you want it.

Or, even better, do it up right and build code that generates html. A similar line is crossed in Perl when you move from providing teeny little CGIs that get called with EXEC CGI tags in html, to full-blown applications with a .cgi on the end.

Re:Good point on PHP

[Telastyn]

Oddly enough, I use php for most of the stuff people use perl for: log parsing, process handling, and general scripting use. Mainly I've not had the need or time to learn perl, despite the fact it's generally nicer; more stable; and a hell of alot faster.

Why to keep perl / why not to use domain spec lang

[Ars-Fartsica]

In short - to reuse the packages you may have already written to do offline work. mod_perl lets you reuse your existing logic.

What I am basically saying is that I don't see the value in a domain-specific language for web scripting. Even outside of perl, java and C# provide good tools for reusing the language you already use elsewhere in your web apps.

Re:Good point on PHP

[Bald Wookie]

why not PHP?

because PHP tends mixes content / presentation and control

It's the programmers that tend to mix the layers, not the language itself. You might think PHP's ability to mix logic and presentation is a fault. I disagree. Let's take a look at some of the things that Larry said about Perl, and apply them to PHP:

As for Perl, it has never been "structured" in that sense, though it has always been structured in the sense that you can create as much structure as you like. The whole point is that the structure is optional, not imposed externally.

This describes the PHP situation fairly accurately. As the programmer, you get to determine the level of structure. This week I've worked on two applications in PHP. One of them is a very unstructured little script so that my brother can get my dynamic IP address. The other is an OO content management system that uses templates for everything. If I had to use highly structured techniques for the first script, it would have been too much of a hassle to bother. If I'd written the second application in unstructured blender mode, I might as well not have bothered.

Now I'm not going to say that I haven't written big projects in an unstructured manner. I've also over-structured small projects. When you wield flexibility, sometimes the gun gets pointed at your foot.

Back to Larry:
You have to have discipline to do programming in the large, but you'll choose the discipline by turning up the big discipline knob yourself, not by having someone else turn it up for you.

This is a philosophical decision, but it's one that I tend to agree with. Having the structures available lets you work on large projects. Not forcing you to use them lets you scratch the little itches. There is a ton of bad PHP out there, but that is the programmer's fault, not the language's.

Re:Good point on PHP

[twoshortplanks]

Domain specific languages are really good. They allow you to think more about the task at hand than the task of getting the language you are using to do the task.

Of course, one such example of a domain language is the Template Toolkit [tt2.org] which is a language that's inside out and designed to be used in places like webpages and config scripts. It's used in Slashdot, and written in Perl (and can call perl routines really easily called.) There's a good justification why not to use pure Perl in the template in the manual [template-toolkit.org]

Of course, come Perl 6 we'll be able to redefine our own grammers. By using a module (technically a grammer) we'll be able to dynamically switch in anohter rule (er, perl 6 regex able to match grammers) in the current scope to parse the current section - essentially our own little mini langauge.

Re:Good point on PHP

[jeorgen]

Ars-Fartsica writes:

In this sense the rise of PHP has mystified me. Why the need for a novel language to do web scripting

mod_php is installed at most Apache based web hosting services, mod_perl practically never.

(The mod_p(erl|hp) makes the scripts run as long running processes instead of short lived processes incurring a lot of overhead).

Besides, there is no standard template language for perl, and that fragments the knowledge in the field in the perl community.

/jeorgen
perl and Zope coder

Re:Good point on PHP

[Jester99]

Why the need for a novel language to do web scripting? The only argument I can see is ease of installation and learning, but those aren't good reasons for serious developers.

When all you have is a hammer... everything looks like a nail.

Perl is a really, really, honkin' big hammer. It can smash just about any nail into anything. But sometimes, a wrench or a screwdriver would do the job better.

A master carpenter doesn't say "I can do anything with this hammer, given enough effort." He's got a giant toolbox filled with a dozen wrenches, a few hammers, screwdrivers... you get the point.

If you want to consider yourself a "serious developer", you should really consider broadening your skill set. There's a lot of things that I can do very fast in perl, but sometimes I need to come up with a quick database enabled website on Windows 2000. I immediately think, "Cold Fusion." Sure, I could install ActiveState perl, but I can do the job twice as quickly in CFML.

Likewise, PHP has it's job creating webpage templates in a UNIX environment. PHP has great database hooks and CGI handling. I can do some things in PHP in fewer lines than in Perl. The converse is also true -- in which case, I use Perl, and not PHP.

So, if you're handy enough with the Perl hammer, you could probably use it for everything. But you might dent up the walls a bit on the way.

Re:Good point on PHP

[Kaz Riprock]

Using both perl and PHP for my various needs, I find that they have equally valid uses for me. I am much happier programming my PHP for WWW-to-DBI applications. If I have my postgresql DB up and running, then I find it more intuitive to use PHP commands that I've learned to access that data and then use its scripting to do any data manipulation (rather than pass it off to another language, etc).

When I'm not accessing my database and just need to parse output or setup other sorts of webpages and things, I find perl to be exceptionally talented as well. It all depends on the entire context of my problem and the involvement of databases and DBIs for me. I know that perl has DBI capability, but I find PHP's DBI commands and things to be a bit more intuitive to the way I think.

This is very similar to Larry's reason for Perl in the first place: Anything to make the user happier about programming the way they want to program...

Donating to the Perl Foundation

[dpt]

Perhaps that's something for companies to consider. Every place I've worked, large and small, has had some Perl working away in the background in some capacity - from humble one-off tasks like formatting the odd bit of text through to being the driver for the automated test framework or managing the corporate web infrastructure.

We seem all too willing to throw money at licenses for Office, but my team uses Perl in many interesting, fun and labour saving ways every single day - even though ostensibly we're coding in C. I think I might make a case to my manager on Monday that a small donation has *already* paid for itself ...

Excellent

[totallygeek]

Always great to read something from Larry Wall. I chuckled a bit recently when I saw the "Wall Nut House".

Excellent interview; would like to see more with him in the future. My dream list right now would be:

• Steven Hawking
• Bill Joy
• Bill Gates
• Steve Jobs
• Mark Horton
• Eric Allman

Re:Excellent

[nwetters]

• ...
• Bill Joy
• ...

Interviewed today by the Financial Times. [ft.com] His solution for building elegant software seems a bit extreme ;)

Software written before Java emerged on the scene - software pre-1995 - was all pretty much a hack. Much of the software that is still being written is a hack. People change slowly. Programmers have to die, almost, for this to change. - Bill Joy

Re:Excellent

[Flamerule]

• Steven Hawking

Stephen Hawking [hawking.org.uk] would probably get annoyed if we asked him to do an interview and misspelled his name.

Removing the % $ and @

[phorm]

I was somewhat wondering who might actually have suggested this, probably not anyone who has made a serious use of Perl.

When I first used Perl, I found the $%@ symbols confusing as all heck, and wished it was more like PHP.

Now that I've used a lot of Perl, I wish PHP would make more use of the $%@ symbols for clarity sakes. Actually, it would be a lot nicer in many languages to use symbol-defined clarifiers, I certainly get tired of "Dim Somevar as sometype" and "sometype somevar" when somebody makes an extremely ambiguous name which doesn't differentiate an array from a scalar or reference variable.

Ignorant people keep educated people employed! - phorm

Re:Removing the % $ and @

[Jerf]

Some of us would say that you should choose variable names to mean what they say, so it's reasonably obvious what the type is. Plural in particular is a big help, and hash/list distinctions can often be made obvious. In dynamic languages, this is usually sufficient.

But while I believe in that, what I *really* want to see in perl is the sigil labelling the named object, not the final value of the expression, i.e., %hashvar{THING_IN_HASH} instead of $hashvar{THING_IN_HASH}. Fortunately, Perl 6 is supposed to do it this way.

Whole language v phonics?

[rw2]

Larry said "We find the same problem in teaching reading to kids. Some people shout "Whole language!" while others shout "Phonics!" Well, guess what, they're both oversimplifying. You have to learn some phonics, and then you learn some larger bits based on that, and some larger bits based on that, and eventually you find that you're intuiting whole language. "

Whole language incoporates phonics as one of it's several learning approaches.

Whole language is, in fact, exactly what you go on to say is the 'right' solution.

(I'm not a teacher by training, but my mum is a reading specialist (with her graduate work focusing on the subject) and I did confirm this with her)

Amen!

[flyneye]

Thats the best explaination of the Christian faith I have ever seen applied to geek speak.
Now if someone will just translate "The Book of Subgenius " into python........

that's my new .sig

[Don Negro]

Perl 6 will give you the big knob.

That's as funny as it gets.

Interesting point about Christianity

[Jeppe Salvesen]

You can't please God the way Enoch did without some faith, because those who come to God must (minimally) believe that:

A) God exists, and
B) God is good to people who really look for him.

That's it. The "good news" is so simple that a child can understand it, and so deep that a philosopher can't.

As much as I respect Larry, I have one thing to say : "The Devil is in the details". "God exists" sounds so simple. It's not. Ethics are fundamentally different in the presence or absence of a God. In the absence, ethics are based around pragmatism and as such adaptible. In the presence, ethics are given to us. Look at history. Which case has proven the better approach? I'd rather God not existed, but if he does, I hope he has foregivness for me since I do in fact live by many of his rules - only out of pragmatism. I expect to burn in hell if there is such a thing, though.

The question wasn't about ethics

[Ted V]

With all due respect, the initial question was "How can you believe in God?" and not "Which of the huge litany of Christian, Catholic, and pseudo-Christian ethical laws do you think actually apply, and how do you reconcile the ones that seem to conflict with scientific evidence?"

Larry really was right-- a lot of people's perceptions make the question more complicated than it needs to be.

I guess I'm a bit confused...

[Ted V]

I guess I'm a bit confused... Since when was the whole point of Christianity getting into Heaven and avoiding Hell? If your view of religion is just about what happens "after death", then I submit that perhaps you're missing the point. Do you really think God made this whole world just to throw it away in a few thousand years after it starts getting interesting?

Not that there isn't any room for discussions of an afterlife, but my impression of Christianity from the Bible reading I've done seems to imply that Christianity is far more about the present world.

My theory is that most Christians look for God to do stuff in the real world and don't see it, so they assume that's because religion only matters for the afterlife. It's a defense mechanism that avoids admitting, "I must have misunderstood something about what God wants."

Re:I guess I'm a bit confused...

[joshki]

It's not. The point of Christianity is to accept Jesus as your personal saviour and Lord. This is the most important part -- Jesus will save you, and in doing so He's going to change the way you live your life. If you don't change, you don't believe -- it's that simple. Many people understand the saviour part -- but most forget the part that you have to accept His control over your life.

The point the original poster was trying to make is that your salvation is not dependant on performing good works -- it's dependant on accepting Jesus, and allowing Him to change your life.

Christianity is about a life change -- not a fire insurance policy.

Re:I guess I'm a bit confused...

[mlong]

I guess I'm a bit confused... Since when was the whole point of Christianity getting into Heaven and avoiding Hell? If your view of religion is just about what happens "after death", then I submit that perhaps you're missing the point. Do you really think God made this whole world just to throw it away in a few thousand years after it starts getting interesting?

No that was just the point I decided to discuss. Christianity is an entire package. That is why I said elsewhere on thsi topic that if you believe in the Lord and accept the holy spirit then He will slowly change you from the inside out. Thus its not that you aren't allowed to do stuff, but rather you do not desire to do stuff (ie immoral stuff).

Not that there isn't any room for discussions of an afterlife, but my impression of Christianity from the Bible reading I've done seems to imply that Christianity is far more about the present world.

Yes it is about both but more importantly what happens in the next world/life. This is why being a martyr in Christianity is not such a bad thing. Jesus spends a great deal of time talking about such things such as he is preparing a mansion for us and he will return and make all things new, etc. Of course being a Christian is all about living a livestyle pleasing to God. So you don't just sit around twidling your thumbs waiting to die...you live life to its fullest, but more importantly, live it as God intended (morally and spiritually).

My theory is that most Christians look for God to do stuff in the real world and don't see it, so they assume that's because religion only matters for the afterlife. It's a defense mechanism that avoids admitting, "I must have misunderstood something about what God wants."

This is very true. God always answers prayers, but sometime his answer is "no" or "not yet" and thats something that is hard for some Christians to accept. God is looking out for what is in our best interests, not our desires.

Re:Interesting point about Christianity

[mlong]

Generally people say, "God couldn't create a being that both had free will and yet would never choose evil, that's a contradiction in terms."

Yep

I then ask, "Okay, God is perfect and we're told It will never choose to do evil. So, does God have free will?"

Yes, God can do whatever He wants. He could be an evil God if he wanted. But He doesn't want to do that, because his very nature is good. I mean, I could get on all fours and act like a dog if I wanted, but why would I want to?

If yes, then there's no contradiction, and God would have created beings like that instead of us humans. If no, then how could such a robot be deserving of worship? It might be wise to kowtow to It, but how could it be moral?

No we are created like God but He didn't clone himself. He created us with a blank slate.

You know Perl rules...

[lamz]

...because all the best ThinkGeek [thinkgeek.com] t-shirts are about Perl!

Japanese, Unicode, and $_

[Bingo Foo]

I live in fear of the new magic variables after Larry learns Japanese.

squeaky clean HTML

[Clover_Kicker]

>the first Slashdot interview guest ever to send his
>answers preformatted in squeaky-clean HTML

What the hell would Slashdot editors know about clean HTML?

Re:squeaky clean HTML

[abischof]

It's especially odd that you get "403 Forbidden" if you try to run it through the Validator [w3.org] :-/.

LOTR

[warmcat]

My wife and I were discussing this bogus leak of The Two Towers the other day, and I said to her that it was a pity Tolkien was not around to see these great films.

She pointed out that he was a crusty old goat, and particularly loathed C. S. Lewis, the author of the Chronicles of Narnia, for his Christian subtext is those stories.

Of course, Larry is probably aware of this and in itself it has no impact of settling The Big Question. BTW I personally interpreted the two-bit explanation given in the answer as the healthy result of getting bored with an unanswerable question. Perhaps it would have been better to leave it on the note that 'this question is not answerable' than '11', though. Maybe a ternary [wmin.ac.uk] system would give results that conform better to what is knowable :?)

Re:LOTR

[Rikardon]

Ummm... considering Tolkien is one of two people Lewis credits as being critical in his conversion to Christianity, I doubt your wife's information comes from a reliable source.

See Lewis' own book, "Surprised by Joy," if you don't believe me; or look at the entry for 1931 in a brief bio on one of the best-known Lewis sites on the Net: http://cslewis.drzeus.net/bio/outline.html

Sorry Larry

[Reality Master 101]

God is good to people who really look for him.

This is actually a premise we can test, and it's simply false. Many studies have been done comparing religious and non-religious people, and it's never been found that religious people end up with "better luck" (better health, better livelyhood, better children, etc) that non-religious people.

Now, you could argue that perhaps these studies aren't correcting properly for whether someone is "really" looking for God, but at the very least we can assume that if God is "good" to those people, then the effect is pretty subtle.

Re:Sorry Larry

[tweek]

Depends on what you consider "good".

Was God good to Job, his most faithful of servants?

Good is a relative term. Many health and wealth preachers will try and tell you otherwise but it's simply not the case.

I would consider God being good to me if I wake up in the morning or if I don't die on the way to work because of some jackass who doesn't understand the concept of a loop exit.

The Bible never promised riches to those who were faithful. Well not unless you count the ones that we store up in heaven. Hell, Jesus himself said that.

Re:Sorry Larry

[tweek]

That's simply not the case. Can you REALLY measure happiness? Some things are immeasurable. You're getting hung up in the tangible. Wind is not tangible. You can't touch it. You can feel it's effects and see it's effects but is it tangible in the same sense as a glass of water?

I'm alot like you in that I think too much about things. It's a blessing AND a curse.

Take something like love. Is my love for my girlfriend measurable? Sure I can buy her gifts and tell her I love her but there is no true measure of love because by nature it is intangible. It's this ethereal concept.

Something interesting that the Bible talks about is faith vs. works. Meaning are we given salvation because of our faith or the "good" deeds we do.

Paul says that your faith in God is enough to save you but that the end result of TRUE faith is good works. A TRUE faith is evidenced by the works of the person who has that faith. It's a natural by-product.

And now here's another twist to the whole thing. Not only are good works the offspring of your faith but you yourself aren't even doing the good works. God is doing them THROUGH you. Pretty neat.

In the end, if you don't honestly WANT to believe in God, you aren't. Nothing can change your mind about that. But if you are a true seeker of truth, I feel that WHATEVER the real truth is (Jesus, Buddah, Allah) will reveal itself to you.

The problem with your logic...

[jaaron]

The first mistake most people make (religious, athiest, or whatever) is incorrectly defining the problem and its scope. Your being too closed minded with your analysis.

Okay, so if there is a God and he/she/it/them/... and if the premise is that "God is good to people who really look for him" then that cannot be properly tested in any way. Why? Because how is God good to them? How many subtle ways might God have saved a person's life or changed it? Perhaps some hardship one faces is, in the long run, "better" for them. And what's more, if there is a God, then the it's quite likely that the "goodness" God will give to those who "really look for him" won't come until some sort of afterlife. And how could you measure that?

So the logic doesn't stand -- as most "logic" people use to claim existance or non-existance of God. Too often people limit the scope of possiblities and come to incorrect and inconsistant conclusions.

the beauty of religion...

[FreeUser]

God is good to people who really look for him.

This is actually a premise we can test, and it's simply false. Many studies have been done comparing religious and non-religious people, and it's never been found that religious people end up with "better luck" (better health, better livelyhood, better children, etc) that non-religious people.

You are absolutely correct.

The beauty of religion, and why it can persist in the face of reason, and even seduce intelligent people like Larry Wall, is that the parameters of every definition are endlessly malleable.

Remember that mustard-seed sized bit of "faith?" That provides all the wiggle room required for any religious premise, no matter how prima facia absurd, to withstand argument, provided you argue on their terms (which is almost always what is expected and demanded). "Faith" means acccepting something which defies logic, so the theologens are correct when they say a tiny bit of faith is all that is required. A tiny bit of willingness to defy logic and accept the absurd is all that is required to promote, and buy into, any belief system at all, no matter how absurd, how self-destructive (remember the now-extinct Shakers? How about the People's Temple?), or how simply plain wrong it is when illuminated by the cold light of reality.

In this particular case, the non-religious people end up being burned 'alive' for all time, while the religious people enjoy a profoundly boring existence playing harps in the presence of the universes most stodgy old man (which of course, makes one wonder what happens to those whose harp-playing skills aren't up to snuff).

Or some variation thereupon, the key ingredients being "the faithful" (there's that word again) get to live well, while the "non-believes" (that would be you and I) are tormented forever.

Given that, god really is good to those who look for him, at least in comparison to his treatment of those who do not.

Re:Sorry Larry

[Zathrus]

So, I suppose that you're going to ignore the numerous studies that show that "people of faith" have a higher survival rate for cancer and other long term illnesses? Or, at the very least, suffer less depression? (Yes, unsurprisingly, different studies have had different results).

Yes, I'm an atheist. And I raise an eyebrow at these studies as well, but to some extent I'm unsurprised. There's a great deal of psychology when it comes to survival of a long term illness, and people who believe in a "higher power" may very well have a better attitude toward all of it, believing that God will pull them through, or that if they die then they're at least going to a better place. Ask any Oncology doctor -- they'll tell you that a good attitude is essential to surviving, and as such believers may be more likely to have that attitude.

And, of course, others have made commentary regarding how you measure "better", and that some measurements may not be accurate. I know that I'd rather be poor and happy rather than rich and miserable. (Of course, I can say this having never really been poor... shrug... but I've been deeply unhappy before in my life and I know I don't like that, and that money doesn't solve it).

Re:I have everything I ever prayed for.

[Reality Master 101]

Without God, NOTHING has meaning.

Why do you think anything HAS to have meaning? To be honest, I gave up on the idea of anything anyone does having any intrinsic "meaning" a long time ago. The only reason anything matters at all is because we are genetically programmed to assign meaning to thing in order to maximize our survivability through a stable society.

But hell, isn't that enough? Can't we take pleasure in the "grand machine" that is the universe, and the random chance (through the process of evolution) that produced us? Why do we need a "clockmaker" behind the curtain?

Damian's Klingon module

[Rupert]

Does anyone know where this is? I can't find it on CPAN.

wall and morality

[Anonymous Coward]

Larry Wall ses: "Because if it turns out to be 0, then we really are the slaves of our selfish genes, and there's no basis for morality other than various forms of tribalism"

there it is again! Religionists, including christians, believe they have a monopoly on morality! this is ignorant and insulting, and you should be ashamed of yourself. Here's a couple of alternatives upon which to base a morality:
1) The Golden Rule: Treat others as you would like to be treated.
2) Homo Sapiens is a social animal, but it is not possible to put any number of animals together in a society without establishing rules of engagement; i.e. a moral code. Call it tribalism if you wish, but since every religious cult seems to have its own moral code, i don't see how religious tribalism is in any way superior to secular tribalism. If there really is an omniscient, all-powerful creator, he/she has done a really shi--y job of getting across a consistent message.

Only Larry Wall

[The Pim]

could get away with using the word "renaissanciest".

Lately, I've seen more and more uptight types[1] [slashdot.org] skewer Larry as a half-assed linguist, a half-assed language designer, a half-assed art historian, and a half-assed philosopher. What they don't realize is that Larry sees things from so many perspectives--some entirely original--and incorporates them so fluidly, that analyzing him in any narrow way is laughably short-sighted. Yes, he is educated in these fields, but expecting him to come off sounding like an orthodox linguist, language designer, art historian, or philosopher entirely misses his true gifts.

Set aside your judgement for a moment, and simply savor the output of one of the most creative, wittiest, and just plain renaissanciest minds with which we have the pleasure to associate. (Oh, he's also a nice guy and never said anything mean about you. :-) )

[1] Yes, they're mostly Python advocates

Re:Only Larry Wall

[The Pim]

He does indeed seem like a nice guy, but also one who has a tendency to put words into mouths.

Larry said,

Python's slogan is "There's only one obvious way to do it."

That's right there in The Zen of Python [python.org].

One thing I have never heard a real python programmer say is that there is only one way to do it.

Larry didn't say that. Nobody said that. That would be ridiculous. Even the "one obvious way" mantra is a point of contention among Python programmers (as the other respondant pointed out, check the comp.lang.python discussions).

By the way, I don't mean to criticize people who prefer Python. I like Python too, especially compared to writing Java. I merely decry the trend to cast Perl and Larry as a dilettanti and a bad hack (in some order). Most of it is mean-spirited and has little merit.

"Hymn #42"?

[Mendax Veritas]

That would be the Jethro Tull song of that name, right?

Oh, Father high in Heaven,

Smile down upon your Son,
Who's busy with his money games,
His women, and his gun.
(Oh, Jesus, save me!)

And the unsung Western hero
Killed an Indian or three,
And then he made his name in Hollywood
To set the white man free.
(Oh, Jesus, save me!)

If Jesus saves,
Well, he'd better save Himself
From the gory glory seekers
Who use His name in death.

Well, I saw him in the city
And on the mountains of the Moon;
His Cross was rather bloody
And he could hardly roll his stone.

I saw the whole thing

[Hotsphink]

I don't need to scratch my head and search my soul to figure out whether God created the universe. I was there. I saw the whole thing.

God didn't create the universe. Well, He did, but not intentionally. God just wanted a beer. But you can't just create a beer floating in the middle of the void -- there's nothing satisfying about it. It would be like a book written by an illiterate person -- sure, he could put lots of black squiggles onto a bundle of pages that would vaguely look like a book, but it wouldn't mean anything.

So for a proper beer, God pretty much had to make up physics. I'm not just talking about the refinements needed to get it to foam just right -- I'm talking about the whole deal. After you drink some, there should be less left over, not more. Drinking a beer should not make you turn into beer yourself. Beers should not be smarter than the drinker. Well, not the first few, at least. The state of drinking beer needs to contrast with something, so the state of not drinking beer must also exist. In fact, that's where most of the world came from, because having the world exist in only two states (currently drinking beer/currently not drinking beer) just seemed too lame to a clever guy like God. Same idea for water and other liquids -- if He can drink beer, He really ought to be able to drink not-beer, just so He can say He chose the beer instead.

And then there's the whole question of origins. A beer is so much less interesting if it creates itself or just spontaneously comes into existence. A truly full-bodied beer needs a background, a character, a story. God went a little crazy with that, inventing those 'human' things with enough cleverness to invent stuff, curiousity to try things out, and a desperate need to get sloshed, smashed, trashed, and basically totally drucking funk. And all that cleverness and curiousity necessitated science. And dinosaur fossils. And religion. (God got a real kick when he realized he'd have to invent religion, I remember. Of course, he wasn't exactly sober by that time...)

Oh, and you know that bit about "...and on the 7th day He rested?" Purely an excuse to keep us from bothering Him during His hangover. We're still on the 7th day, see. I'm not even sure if He thought far enough ahead to make an 8th day. He was having some trouble with the notion of Time, and I recall Him saying something like "aw, screw it. Nobody's going to be drinking any beer at the speed of light anyway. I'll see you later -- I'm gonna go get wasted."

God in two bits

[The Wookie]

Talk about a sudden flash of enlightenment!

The existence of God is represented as the two-bit value 11. I *finally* understand what is meant by the holy trinity.

Thanks Larry!

The magic knob!

[j3110]

Hopefully, this knob of which he speeks will have a "Readable" selection. I find myself, after having written some perl (and commented it), wondering what I just did to make it work. When I go back to fix some bug, I find it easier to just redo a section than to figure out exactly why it was functional (not even considering the bug at this point). The line noise perl programs should be impossible when the knob is set "Readable".

As for theology, the existance of God to me is a qubit that can be observed with any given teaching. When I use the Bible to observe it, I keep getting a 0 because the old testiment was much to brutal for me to accept as devine. That's better than getting the -1 that I think I would get with scientology though :).

artistic expression

[wiredog]

I dunno, some (well, actually, most) of the women I know are, imho, proof that God is an artist.

Sunsets too.

Re:Obligatory religious quibble

[bravehamster]

Hmmm. Seems to me that could equally be the basis for an argument against an "Author". If you look at life on earth, there is basically only one way to do it. It's all genes and DNA and every complex living thing shares something in common with the others. There is no "artistic expression" that shows up at all.

It's hard to see the diverse creative gifts of an author when you're only looking at a single page of a novel.

Re:Obligatory religious quibble

[mlong]

Hmmm. Seems to me that could equally be the basis for an argument against an "Author". If you look at life on earth, there is basically only one way to do it. It's all genes and DNA and every complex living thing shares something in common with the others. There is no "artistic expression" that shows up at all.

I think you're quite wrong there. What you're saying is like me saying there is no artistic expression in anything I write since they all use Perl and run under UNIX? Personally I see a lot of expression and differences when I look at all of the types of animals.

Obligatory existential quibble

[UberQwerty]

Once you look at the level your brain is most comfortable with, you can see the art and creativity.

First of all, beauty is in the eye of the beholder, and beauty is relative. Everything is beautiful; some things are simply not very beautiful (or maybe negatively beautiful; whatever), just like very cold things simply have very little heat. Of course something is beautiful if you look at it on the level your brain likes most. What if I look at a rotten, brown banana peel soaking in a mixture of used motor oil and fly-infested human feces? Not beautiful. But what if I look at it through a microscope? I might find the microscopic structure beautiful. I have not, however, changed what I'm looking at; only how I'm looking at it. Remember, beauty is not just in the beholder, it is also in his or her "eye."

As for artistic expression, an object is art if and only if two conditions are met: someone created it, and that creator claims/intends that the creature is art. I don't want to get into the argument of whether humans are the creatures of some more powerful entity; the point is that unless you manage to convince the entire rest of the world that humans are creatures and not accidents, you cannot expect people to agree with you when you say that humans are works of art. A rock formation may be beautiful, but it is not art unless someone put it that way on purpose.

Re:"because God told me"

[Etcetera]

If God told me to do something, I'd sure as hell do it.

Re:"because God told me"

[jonabbey]

And why not? Faith is meant to transcend the scientifically knowable. As long as one doesn't cling to one's faith to the extent of shutting out scientifically demonstrable and materially important facts, what's the harm in feeling positive, or even joyful, about the universe?

I'm glad that Larry is loved by the universe, even though I myself tend to believe we're all just a fascinating lot of wondrous complexity arising out of a bunch of initially unordered bits. Sort of like Perl. ;-)

Re:"because God told me"

[Lemmy Caution]

The truest part of his statement is his honesty in admitting that he was raised in a very religious environment, and that his own personal religiousity was a way of trying to consolidate and preserve as much of that as he can (which is often part and parcel of preserving a relationship with one's family of origin) while still maintaining some logical consistency.

For any truly intelligent, open-minded evangelical Christian, the hard question is "so, you really believe that all the Buddhists, Jews, Hindus and secularists are all damned to hell, and that only people in the Born-Again Club get in?" Because this is such a counter-intuitive notion to anyone who would attribute any compassion to God, that salvation hinge not on the stance of your spirit but on your doctrinal commitments, that many cannot really bring themselves to say it.

For me, the saddest bit of it is that a true authentic sense of spiritual feeling, compassion, and expansiveness becomes burdened with exclusionary and sanctimonious doctrines and attitudes. Larry Wall seems like a truly wonderful person, almost despite his creeds as much as because of them.

And the winner of the ultimate oxymoron prize is..

[Anonymous Coward]

> truly intelligent, open-minded evangelical Christian

Re:"because God told me"

[barawn]

So here you are thinking for God. If God says you must believe in him to be saved, why is that so hard to follow? And how can you say a Hindu believes in the one true God? Because a Hindu doesn't. It's not most people on this planet haven't been exposed to Christianity and can say "Well I never knew!". It's not like its a hard religion. You don't have to follow hundreds of laws, you don't have to bow down 5 times a day...you just have to believe. He's made the path fairly easy and if people don't follow it then its because they chose to not follow it and miss the train. It's silly for people to keep arguing how evil God is because he'll send everyone to hell who refuses to believe in him.

Wow. That's really bizarre. Where to start...

The first question to ask is "what/who is God?" Without that, your question doesn't mean anything. Note that God, in the Bible, didn't even give himself a name - just "I am" (which is about as fundamental as you can get). Who are you to say that what a Hindu, or a Jew, or a Muslim, or a Wiccan believe in isn't God as well? If you haven't heard the elephant parable, you should - basically, if a bunch of blind men are trying to describe an elephant by touch, you'll get a ton of completely disparate answers, which, when looked at from a higher stance, all make sense. It's much the same way with religion. All religions have the same kernel of truth to them - it's up to the people to figure them out.

I find it amazingly hard to believe that people put such huge restrictions on God, that he can't present himself to billions upon billions of people in billions upon billions of ways.

Your argument is just weak - what about all of the people who were born before Christ? What about all of the Native Americans, who were geographically distinct? What about infants? God presents himself in many different ways to many different people, and the truth is that they're all true. Just because you can't handle many seemingly contradictory things being true doesn't make them not true.

Axioms

[Jerf]

I love it when religious arguments that purport to be "logical" include statements like this.

You need to go back and study your logic more.

All logical arguments contain statements on the order of "God told me." They are called axioms. Axioms are the foundation of a given logical system and cannot be proven inside of the system. If they can be "disproven", we call the system "inconsistent", but for any non-trivial real-world philosophical system, it's effectively impossible to disprove the axioms, either.

You cannot avoid the need for axioms. Some common axioms that most of us accept include "We are not just brains in a vat being fed sensory information with no 'real world'", "Other people are concious entities as I am (non-solipsism)", more generally "The real world really exists, for some definition of 'real'". None of these statements can be proven; we take them on faith.

Things get especially fuzzy when talking about personal experiences. How would you know if God is speaking to you, if he exists? How do you know he didn't? You end up needing to axiomize here, too.

To stay on a meta-level, few people examine their philosophies well enough to uncover their axioms, and few people ever compare their axioms carefully enough to the real world to see if they match, or if their own behavior matches. Worse yet, a lot of people accept on an axiomatic level that "I am correct", writing the ability to question beliefs right out of the equation. (While often also simulataneously accepting the contradictory axiom that they are "open minded"!) With respect, if you can make statements like that, I would strongly suggest that you may be one of those people.

To me, one of the worst things about people accepting the "strict materialist scientific" viewpoint is how rarely they examine it closely enough to realize how little they live their lives that way. That viewpoint essentially precludes all ethics or morality, since that viewpoint completely eliminates any concept of "good" or "bad". (Some people patch it up by defining some concept of good or bad, but it's usually boils down to hedonism, on one level of sophitication or another, which is unsatisfactory to most people, even when their system says that's all they can hope for.) If you (the reader, not our dear friend "Anonymous Coward" here) have examined your philosophy and feel you have answers to this issue, then fine; you'd probably agree that it's not a common thing to do.

A highly consistent system can be built around accepting God as existing, in my non-humble opinion, much more consistent and logical then any such system that does not. I strongly recommend the works of Francis Schaeffer [google.com] for a good treatment of that. (Several seperate books combine to form one whole, plus other books which then build on that foundation.) Until you have examined this foundation, plus the foundations that others believe in, in particular Larry's (since you attack him in particular in your message), you probably shouldn't be tossing accusations around. (I don't know Larry's though it sounds familiar based on this small snippet I see; I don't want to jump to any conclusions, though.)

In particular, it is importent to first examine the system in its own context before passing judgement on it. Examining a philosophical system from the point of view of another one is a waste of time... OF COURSE it will look like it has holes, there's a serious mismatch. That tells you nothing. Believe me, the scientific strict materialist has its own share of wholes from other points of view, too!

In summation, you should put your own affairs in order and learn more about how logic REALLY works before accusing others of being illogical. Logic is not on anybody's side, not even the scientific strict materialists. It is a tool that works for all equally, based on the axioms input into it. (Of course, all but one system will be logically flawed, except the true system, but determining which system that is in real life is not something to be done causually. Some may be patently obvious, but the better-thought-out varients of Christian theology/philosophy are IMHO not one of them.)

Re:Perl is obsolete

[Ubergrendle]

It always comes down to one thing: do you believe, or do you not? What Larry has done is presume that he acknowledges God exists, and then built a tree of logic around it to simplify all of the apparent contradictions and relgious dogma BS. He qubit analogy is actually quite quaint and elegant, but still makes that one fundamental leap of faith...

Re:Python fanboy

[dpt]

Don't try that in Perl. No really, don't

Why not? I'm almost as well versed in Python as Perl, and frankly, I'd trust Perl first. Python just doesn't have the developer base. The modules for various things like databases always seem to be lagging behind, or the developer has moved on, and so on.

And I'm pretty sure Perl *is* being used for large scale things. Like, say, Amazon ;)

Besides, being familiar with both, I'm pretty confident in asserting that, aside from surface level syntactic difference, they're more similar than they are different.

you can learn and write Python in a day

That is, quite simply, not true. Sure, the language is simple, but it's an illusion as the complexities are now in the modules. Take regexes - you still have to learn them to get anything done, but yes, you can learn the "core language" in a day. But so what?

And the language itself is not as simple as it first appears: it's actually quite idiomatic in some respects and learning the Python way takes time and patience. I really think this "learn it in a day" mantra damages Python, as people find they *don't* learn it in a day, and give up.

Splat == Asterisk

[Starship Trooper]

It's not an operator in Ruby per se, just a special method declaration/calling syntax. When you declare a method like so:

def foo(bar,bas,*qux)
(...body goes here...)
end

it means that the method takes at least two arguments. The first two will be assigned to bar and bas, and the rest will be stored in an array qux, e.g. if you were to call:

frob = foo(1, 1, 2, 3, 5, 8)

the parameters would be set as follows:

bar = 1
bas = 1
qux = [2, 3, 5, 8]

Following Ruby's philosophy of Least Surprise, the same syntax works to expand an array in-place. So you could call the above function as follows:

array = [2, 4, 8, 16]
frob = foo(1, *array)

which will expand the elements of array into the argument list, resulting in the following parameters for foo():

bar = 1
bas = 2
qux = [4, 8, 16]

Perl 6 will pass arrays by reference into subs, rather than expand them in-place as Perl 5 does now. Wall has chosen to borrow Ruby's splat (*) to achieve this effect, so that the following possibly misleading perl5 code:

@foo = (0666, "/home/joe/file.txt");
chmod @foo;

would need to explicitly expand the array in perl6:

@foo = (0666, "/home/joe/file.txt");
chmod *@foo;