Comment by throwanem
3 days ago
I believe Perl was first called "the duct tape of the Internet" about 20 years ago.
Ever tried to deal with 20-year-old duct tape?
3 days ago
I believe Perl was first called "the duct tape of the Internet" about 20 years ago.
Ever tried to deal with 20-year-old duct tape?
It’s also been called a Swiss Army chainsaw. I even have that t-shirt.
Oh, I know. It lives up to the name, too: like all Victorinox products, it's the wrong tool to use for everything it purports to do well, along with what it doesn't.
I’ve seen Julian when he gets pieces which have been duct taped. He’s not a happy camper.
I don't understand.
Julian Baumgartner is a professional fine art conservator with a fairly popular youtube channel. Duct tape shows up from time to time in the pieces he's tasked with conserving, and it's always a terrible thing.
In fact it's a pretty big feature in the latest video (a drum) where he calls it
> a horrible material, because when it's fresh and young the adhesive's really goey and hard to get off, and then, when it gets old, the adhesive dries and it's... hard to get off
and he has to deal with both on the same drum.
You can't fix broken mugs with duct tape. ;)
>Partway through, Jon Orwant comes in, and stands there for a few minutes listening, and then he very calmly walks over to the coffee service table in the corner, and there were about 20 of us in the room, and he picks up a coffee mug and throws it against the other wall and he keeps throwing coffee mugs against the other wall, and he says "we are fucked unless we can come up with something that will excite the community, because everyone's getting bored and going off and doing other things".
https://en.wikibooks.org/wiki/Raku_Programming/Perl_History#...
Intermission: The Jon Orwant Mug-Throwing Incident in 2000
By 2000, it was evident that Perl needed an infusion of life:
"The [P5P / Perl Conference] meeting was originally a gathering of Chip Salzenberg, Jarkko Hietaniemi, Elaine Ashton, Tim Bunce, Sarathy, Nick Ing-Simmons, Larry Wall, Nat Torkington, brian d foy and Adam Turoff, brougt together to draft a constitution of sorts since the community seemed to be fragmenting. Jon showed up to the meeting late and found us talking about the community and started throwing things to express his discontent with how perl itself was stagnating, possibly even dying, and that we should be talking about reviving Perl. The cup incident was planned theatre from what I was told later. So, it was already a fait accompli but the tantrum was it's outing." [1]
https://www.nntp.perl.org/group/perl.packrats/2002/07/msg3.h...
Andrew.Savige@ir.com [Andrew.Savige@ir.com] quoth:
Well...calling it a catalyst may be too dramatic a word. The meeting was originally a gathering of Chip Salzenberg, Jarkko Hietaniemi, myself, Tim Bunce, Sarathy, Nick Ing-Simmons, Larry Wall, Nat Torkington, brian d foy and Adam Turoff, brougt together to draft a constitution of sorts since the community seemed to be fragmenting. Jon showed up to the meeting late and found us talking about the community and started throwing things to express his discontent with how perl itself was stagnating, possibly even dying, and that we should be talking about reviving Perl. The cup incident was planned theatre from what I was told later. So, it was already a fait accompli but the tantrum was it's outing.
only one. 5 were thrown but they were tough :)
Coffee mugs. Standard hotel issue.
White.
No :)
No :) Thank goodness as I'd hate to have a photo of me diving under the table.
https://web.archive.org/web/20110716115800/http://www.spider... is about as close to a photo of this as you'll find :)
e.
There's a current in human affairs to be sure. By 2000 it had just about washed Perl as far east as Memphis, where it became the first language in which I considered myself to be doing "real programming," and not long after the springboard into the first 20 years of an engineering career whose last 20 look likely to embody a role Tim Leary might have purported to recognize. (The last time having a genuine conversation with a computer was really part of the public vernacular, so was he, of course! Wrong about everything as always, but sometimes provocatively so.)
I'm not sorry to have stopped working in Perl, broken cups or no; thinking back on my time with it puts me forcibly in mind of what I believe to have been Wirth's comments on the hazards of early exposure to BASIC, and "The Rails' Progress" in the late 2000s and after I would nominate as the corresponding farce.
Perl was later called “executable line noise”.
"Perl is a write only language"