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SIGILS_OF_POWER

                                             August 9, 2006


Steve Yegge's list of the things Larry got right
is impressive, but not complete.

Here's one he missed:
perl was designed to
evolve.  It's a language     This is because
where new keywords can be    variable names begin
introduced without           with sigils $, @, %     In essence a kind of
breaking older code...       for scalar, array,      "Hungarian Notation"
                             and hash.               is built into the
It has a regexp                                      language --
syntax that allows
the addition of new                                  But perl is never given
features: where                                      credit for this bit of
paren-question-mark                                  enforced orderliness.
is the "sigil".
                                                     Wouldn't want to
                                                     complicate the
                                                     stereotype, would we?



                      "the thing that still amazes me about perl
                      is that they figured out a way to evolve
                      the language into this thing that has rich
                      data structures, supports OO, exceptions,
                      etc. even though that wasn't a part of the
                      original design. i mean, for crying out
                      loud, it was a crappy little hybrid between
                      awk / sh / sed / C in the beginning. look
                      at it now. i feel like some of these other
                      languages that possibly had a 'better'
                      design from the get-go aren't evolving as
                      well."

                               "September 24 2006", by alan
                               [ref]



Another thing Steve Yegge
he may have missed:

  Maybe perl's strange
  "irregularties" just
  aren't that big a
  disadvantage.

  Maybe Larry Wall's notion of
  a language-like computer
  language was not that crazy...



      print "So give it a $expletive rest, already";


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