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BLADES_OF_PERL
August 07, 2009
What was Steve Yegge talking about
when he said this?
[ref]
"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?"
[ref]
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