September 6, 2002

Larry Wall On Perl, Religion, and…

Here. The philosophy of TMTOWTDI (There’s more than one way to do it) is a direct result of observing that the Author of the universe is humble, and chooses to exercise control in subtle rather than in heavy-handed ways. The universe doesn’t come with enforced style guidelines. Creative people will develop style on their own. Those are the sort of people that will make heaven a nice place.” This doesn’t have anything to do with Windows programming directly, although I know a lot of Windows programmers use Perl, but I find Larry interesting and this in my news and so I’ll post what I like. : ) This article is a Slashdot interview where dotters post questions and the interviewee answers them. In this interview, Larry compares Perl to Perl (5 vs. 6), Perl to Java, Perl to Python, Perl to .NET and, my favorite, Perl to the universe as a whole, where he sees himself as applying the same principles in the creation of Perl as God used in creating the universe (which explains why Perl is so messy : ). [slashdot.org]