May 2012 Archives

Andy Lester, brian d foy, Gisle Aas, and Adrian Howard featured in RSA Animate video - The Power of Networks

This image is from http://www.thersa.org/events/video/animate/rsa-animate-the-power-of-networks

perl-mslima.jpg

See also my tweet and Google+ post about this video.


Update for Sun May 27 10am-ish EDT. . . Whoops, I should have included Stevan Little in the title of this post:

cpan-explorer-authors.png

He's unnamed Perl contributor in the first image I posted. I'm listening to the original audio of the lecture from which the RSA Animate video is based and was able to find http://www.visualcomplexity.com/vc/project.cfm?id=685 which links to http://cpan-explorer.org/category/authors/ which is where I found this second image. See also slide 29 from the slides of the talk. The first image is obviously an illustration of the second image. Very cool. I love this stuff. And I had never heard about http://cpan-explorer.org which is just fabulous.

Also a made a second Google+ post that links back to this one.

Ward Cunningham on Perl: fast to develop, fast to run, insightful

From an Interview With Ward Cunningham in Dr Dobb's Journal published May 15, 2012:

That's when I picked up Perl. And it shocked me, just how well it worked for finding and plundering files because it had those reg exes built in and stuff like that. And it was so fast. It was fast to compile, it was fast to develop, it was fast to run. I could not believe it was so fast. And I know people like to complain about it, but I also thought it showed a tremendous amount of insight. It was insight, and I looked at it and I said, "Who would have thought of making a language like that?" That's when I realized that open source was here to stay. There is no commercial endeavor that ever would have invented Perl.

But Perl was my escape from object-oriented programming, and I still use it today. Probably a day doesn't go by that I don't just pick up Perl right at the command line just because idiomatically I can write commands. I know there's a command in UNIX but rather than go the command page and try to remember the options, I just write it from scratch in Perl. You know, I go on and finish the line. I know Perl well enough that I can do that. I think if you write big programs you know stuff that I never bothered to learn about Perl.

About Philip Durbin

user-pic I blog about Perl.