Author: 2003-8-1 0:48:13 Source: blog China (Blogchina.com) original source: AKA magazine "Larry Wall was how messy invented a programming language - then changed the face of the WEB?" LarryWall Smiling and recalling Yahoo's co-founder Davidfilo sent him a few years ago, when Yahoo publicly opened the market, it wrote: "If there is no perl, Wall invented universal programming language, Yahoo is impossible to start So, Larry, you are willing to buy some cheap, Yahoo's original shares (IPO)? "Retroiled to 1996, when the madness of the Silicon Valley Internet IPO was in absolute height, such a proposed proposal did not see if you accept it A automatic unloading truck loaded with solid gold products transported to your door to the lawn. But for Wall, money is never motivation. Although it is considered to be the most valuable tools of hackers, Wall is still calm In a small town in a small town in a small town in a remote California, the old 1977 HODA Accord is processed. Urdl and money have nothing to do, Wall is just to solve a programming problem encountered in daily work to invented this language. And from the beginning he confirmed that the source code of Perl is free. People always think of using Perl to do a patch - whether it is to construct an Internet directory company that is millions of mate rounds or is just in their own Top of the homepage. Although Wall may be very frugal, he is not stupid. He accepted this proposal and purchased some Yahoo's stock for his 14-year-old daughter - this is also enough to pay her university fees. About The better example of the rules of the ancient "Gift Economy" on the Internet is almost impossible - investment network, you can profit. Larry Wall likes to call Perl "Rough" language. His gentle voice, he describes Perl: He is a smooth, docile servant, just exists for "let him obey your needs". Most of the most perl hackers on the web are not moderate: they claim, Perl is an indispensable adhesive that makes the entire web tightly ---- Not just Yahoo, there is Amazon and other million sites.erl supporters think that if there is no Perl and Larry Wall Then, the network is just a pale shadow it now. Whether in promoting the development of the Web, Wall plays an important corner during the development of the Freesoftware / OpenSource sports of many Internet infrastructure. Color. But even if he respects his "extremely important leader and wisdom of the old", Wall's leadership style is absolutely humble - this significant personality makes him distinguish other leadership of the movement. As a missionary son and grandson, Wall is a devout infantist. According to his friends, Perl's intimate partner Tom Christiansen said his mission is to achieve his ideal - "Let people work together. He plans to work in his heart Selfless perception can do some mutually beneficial work for Perl. But he will not allow himself to be involved in the unimportant "belief" war, these wars are in the programming world ---- those who have no endless arguments Is there a programming language or an operating system is better than another. Such a fierce argument is the preference of hackers who like to be clear, they don't allow even the small variable space exists --- The foundation concept in the computer world is / No, 0/1 and other numbers, the ambiguity is the world outside. But Wall and Perl are all in small spaces, which are messy non-mateness and vague creativity. After all, the value of the transfer is not only there to solve a specific problem for you, but it is for you to complete a job. To a certain extent, Perl is not the first. But that is not Wall concerned. His modest goal is useful, it is to help people do what they need to do - - implement programming language, hardware platform, multiple software fields Connect with people working with the same cosmic space. If you think carefully, you will find that Perl is all the network. For more than 10 years ago, I will first invented Perl until the network growth in 1994 began to explode. This is not for accident.
The network is a hacker gathered, the messy is existence, it requires fast thinking and faster reactions. Perl is the best friend of a network hacker. How Larry Wall changes the entire computer culture. "I tried to get simultaneous The right amount of flexibility and stability ", in some messy home in his mountai view, Wall said. He is talking about the matter of Perl, but his attitude integrates the basis of daily life. Wall has a Caller ID ( The call mark is connected to the computer so that he has a corresponding sound for each phone. Callerid is good, Wall asked, if you have to go far, you have to answer the phone to know who is called? ? Similarly, pressing his doorbell also issued a series of dialogue from a Wallace & Gromit clay puppet; when his dryer (hiding in the garage), a whistle will resound throughout the room. Wall's occupation is a System administrator, rather than a software engineer. System administrator tends to program and technology to a utilitarian attitude - they pay attention to make the network constantly run, solve urgent problems, and quickly program. Wall as A programmer, life is used to solve this problem - perl is the nearest tool in his personal craft warehouse. He has reached a hacker's place before he constructed Perl, he wrote "RN" - - A program for reading a USENET newsgroup. For software development, RN is a prototype now called Freesoftware or OpenSource model ---- The programmers in all localities collaborate through the network, by making everyone You can get the code to improve the product. Wall wrote RN, after the source code is issued on the Internet, then start the upgrade version, this upgrade version contains the recommendations and bugs from other hackers from the original network space.
But back to the mid-1980s, is not easy to issue upgraded version through the network. People usually pass through the 300-1200 baud rate MODEM connection network, it is impossible to pass the source code of the upper shifting on the source code of the upper shift, and now this The situation is normal. So Wall wrote a small program called "patch" .Patch with a compressed new upgrade source code and can be applied to the previous source code. Patch can improve the speed of the old code update, and even very Smart considerations have made changes in the previous source code. As a hacker, Wall is a quite careful person, but that doesn't mean that he is always very modest. "Patch changed computer culture", Wall said. "I have been over." I have always believed that Patch is his most important contribution to OpenSource Culture, although he has never attracted this bigger, more attractive engineering attention as Perl or RN, "OpenSource's most famous leader One Eric Raymond said. "Patch may be the most successful live", Raymond said, "Larry effectively created," at least crucially contributed to the modern highly distributed development model of the modernization of Linux. "Patch is followed by Perl. On the surface, he is a completely different stuff, a highly complex" script "language, intended to plan to write automatic tasks, connection incompatible procedures, and systems or problems that are difficult to deal with. Perl originated from 1986, Wall is a system administrator of Burroghs's subsidiaries. At that time, he was committed to a secret project of information on information between California Santa Monica and Paoli, PA. ", But nsa more than wants to hopose information synchronization - it also wants to generate reports about each exchange, and Wall existing tools are not the same as this task. Combine all things to need an emergency solution, a programming The live children finally became Perl ---- Practical extraction and report language ("I realized that there is a great blank area between C language and UNIX shells," Wall said, "C can Handling complex things - you can call it 'Operation complex' and shells is good at dealing with things I call 'whipupudes'. But there is a large blank area, no matter whether C is still shells can't handle well, this It is the purpose of my design Perl. "Since then, Wall took his spare time and energy to explore the needs of all large blank areas in the computer." People are always looking for gaps. " Wall said, "They are always looking for new ecology The environment. The speed of you enter these ecological environments is really important because the first person entering these environments is always the winner. "Perl is a winner. Wall guarantees the specific power of Perl ---- text processing, flexible Sex and a toolset that is very useful to solve the fast / difficult problem - - they make programmers to learn about Perl: such as David Filo and Jerry Yang, these two STANFORD universities have created Yahoo. They found Perl is indispensable. They use Perl to generate web pages, write code for their execution web data collected, and maintain the database of the web address. "We greatly depend on it", Filo said, "Since it can be developed quickly," You can make these things soon. Yahoo's experience is not the only, Tim O'Reilly, computer book publishing company O'Reilly & Associates CEO and the founder said more than O'Reilly Publishing the best-selling Perl computer book. Three years ago, they also hired Wall as Perl's full-time sales. "Perl do this is very smooth", O'Reilly said, "Perl is easier to understand than traditional programming languages, and I think it is to be constructed and imagined. Web is a very important part. He makes amateurs into ---- You don't have to be a professional programmer ... Although Perl may be a bit difficult, it may be a bit blurred, it is a bit of ambitious, it is still available for those who want to do. You can quickly bundle things together and solve problems quickly. "
I just try my best to make the computer more than the programmer. What is the difference in the position of Perl? It is compared with the other computer language of Sun Compared to the other computer language - Java / Python / TCL, what is the difference? Perl's supporter said that It is a "Swiss Army Swarf" - a tool that can be used efficiently. Learn Perl, one person does not have to be a proficient Java / C programming genius, although Perl's own flexibility makes it sometimes confuse - Especially for programmers who are accustomed to solve problems with only one way. But Perl has the best advantage in establishing a bridge between other computer languages. "Perl once, and continued to be prototype glue language" One of Chip Salzenberg, Perl is one of the most important code distributors. "According to the design, its evolution is to face daily challenges for real programmers, need to make the need for complex and non-cooperative system coordination work.
Larry Wall believes this evolution process reflects how the real world works. Perl made a lot of work, Wall said, and gave him a good feedback to him, so when you try to quickly develop something If you have a very fast improvement. You trial something, then it is wrong, you will make him grow up, develop. I just write the program. Many people are programming, they also think so. . Wall said that Perl reflects the real life - his human characteristics - is a deep philosophical structure built in this language. URL is, the first post-modern computer language, Wall said, one artificial nature Language, simulating how programmers think. The deep structure of all languages is the main focus of Wall. In his life, he and his wife are UC-Kerkeley language as a system administrator and related hacking. Student. Wall said, their plan is to become a missionary of the battlefield, and is committed to the translation of the Bible. They will work from a Bible without written language, from the head, write down, and then help to make the Bible Translated into the language. He gave up this task and his wife, but he turned another job - helping others to achieve similar objectives - with others to connect to do some useful things. When this piece Things turned to create a programming language, rather than thoroughly build some things from head, Wall - from his language training - choose to build some things to copy the thoughts and behaviors of real people. First And the most important thing is that this means providing many different ways to solve each possible problem - this causes the PERL's battle slogan, "There is not a path to be realized." If you think people's language is an art media ", Wall said," He has given you a creative space. If you want to optimize for different things - if you want to use the same language to open a prescription, poem, write newspaper columns and magazine topics - he It must be flexible. This is very different from people in computer science. People are teaching if there is any redundancy, it is harmful, bad. From the perspective of natural language, I don't buy it (refer to computer science The teachings. "Perl moved along a real language, absorbing the advantages of other languages for a long time - there are some UNIX, some C , some Basic, one point, one thing. If anyone else There are some fresh, useful things, and Perl will contain him. When Wall calls these "postmodernism" concepts, he refers to Perl's compromise, inclusive way - you can find it in every concealment and cracks. A little bit of truth --- simultaneous use of itself by any big truth. When he appeared, most computer language tried to think about the computer, "WA LL said, "I tried to make the computer more than the programmer, and reached a certain degree of success. The problem is that who is the leader, this is all the", although Perl is very popular, this language is not opposed Maudwing, Redhat's Chief Technology, Linux business version of the main distributor, is willing to use Python; Infoseek, Internet Search Engine, use Python to do internal development work. Perhaps the most powerful criticism from Eric Raymond, he will long-term PERL One of the most successful stories of Open Source sports. "The design of this language shows his age and obvious expansion mark, and Perl never is a beautiful or elegant language; his induceration is his direct availability After a long time, in my opinion, the problem of Larry's early choice is to accumulate and strengthen other advantages. "" "These problems have caused many people to lose from using Perl to other scripting languages,", raymond Said, "I personally is part of this trend; I have turned it entirely from Perl to Python, a young language, a bit icon but have a clearer design ... I expect to reduce the importance of Perl in the future. Even the base of the developer continues to grow on the absolute number, because his competitors will grow more than the competitors of Perl. "Perl has a lot of advantages, but it is unclear - actually use Perl Hacker with "confusion"
As a commendable, but for Perl's attacker, even Python supporters, confusion made programmed taboo. I recently from Perl users (but also Python users - but they don't always like python) One of the most complaints is - when you have no contact with Perl, even if your own Perl code is difficult to read - don't mention the people's Perl code. "Guidovanrossun, the main author of Python", "For past or unfamiliar Python code this is a problem. When PERL supporters strongly promote Perl users write clear code, and newer Perl versions contain some help Features, Perl adheres to the value of "chaos" means that this is always a problem.
