Archive of UserLand's first discussion group, started October 5, 1998.

Re: TThoughts on ESR and Perl

Author:Dave Winer
Posted:8/26/1999; 12:48:46 PM
Topic:Opening Up Linux Journal and O'Reilly
Msg #:9983 (In response to 9981)
Prev/Next:9982 / 9984

Now, Larry Wall has a point. Almost nobody knows the rules to English, but we all speak it just fine. Perl is popular, so many people must like irregular, non-orthogonal programming languages.

Thanks for the clarification Eric, and I want to also disclaim that when we're debating this way I am merely expressing my own opinion and not speaking for UserLand.

Now I disagree with the quoted statement above. I think we do not communicate well with English, most of the time. I had never considered the possibility that it's due to the lack of understandable rules in the language, but I want to give this some thought.

About ESR and me, the first time I heard of him was the Cathedral piece he wrote. I felt targeted by it, and reduced to a simple evil, and I work hard and I care about quality, and I don't like to be side-swiped by someone who's just another Microsoft basher.

Further, I saw all kinds of people who I knew to be software idiots repeating his words as if they had found some precious wisdom. This is the pattern of the software biz. It makes me want to barf. I always think the trained parrots are a sign of where not to go. If they say Open Source Open Source Open Source I say Head for the Hills, Head for the Hills, etc, until it's safe to come down and resume *our* mission, which is to enable the web as a publishing medium, which is a far broader mission than promoting anything having to do with releasing source code for operating systems, web servers and script interpreters.

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