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BLADES_OF_PERL
August 07, 2009
What was Steve Yegge talking about
when he said this?
"Larry has turned what was a
gentleman's war into guerilla
tactics. He consistently and
cleverly (I never said he wasn't GENTLE_ART_OF_PROGRAMMING
brilliant) slanders other
languages and language communities ..."
As far as I can tell, he's referring to
things like this Larry Wall speech:
"More than that, I combined these cool
features in a way that makes sense to
me as a postmodern linguist, not in a
way that makes sense to the typical
Modernistic computer scientist.
Recall that the essence of Modernism
is to take one cool idea and drive it
into the ground. It's not difficult to
look at computer languages and see
which ones are trying to be modern by
driving something into the
ground. Think about Lisp, and
parentheses. Think about Forth, and
stack code. Think about Prolog, and
backtracking. Think about Smalltalk,
and objects. (Or if you don't want to
think about Smalltalk, think about
Java, and objects.)
"Think about Python, and
whitespace. Hi, Guido.
"Or think about shell programming, and
reductionism. How many times have we
heard the mantra that a program
should do one thing and do it well?"
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