Interview with Larry Wall (of $Perl fame) -- The man who invented a universe and a culture "to reach a goal", as it is the mantra of "the hacker", to "do everything to reach a goal"

SamiDena@programming.dev · edit-2 3 months ago

Interview with Larry Wall (of $Perl fame) -- The man who invented a universe and a culture "to reach a goal", as it is the mantra of "the hacker", to "do everything to reach a goal"

SamiDena@programming.dev · 3 months ago

Yeah true that. However the blast radius of the first big mistake (the whole FORTRAN lexing problem which ignored spaces) was so large that it shaped history… I wonder how Backus felt! I do wish I’d had more important jobs. Despite loving web as a concept, and having indulged in it for the past 20 years — ever since I was 12, I have never really developed a web application because I’m scared of getting ‘pigeonholed’ into web. The one web job I had destroyed my life, no kidding. But right now, I switched from the software I gave you, into making something like Pandoc. I want it feed it a reStructuredText-like syntax and get back HTML, PDF, LaTeX, Postscript, SVG, DVI! All in one file (that’s the power of scripting, portability). I want to make a blog. Because the one time I had a blog people bullied me and told me why I’m putting stuff there I don’t know about. It was a blog about OpenGL and low-level graphics :(

Sorry I rambled. Thanks.

Interview with Larry Wall (of $Perl fame) -- The man who invented a universe and a culture "to reach a goal", as it is the mantra of "the hacker", to "do everything to reach a goal"

Interview with Larry Wall (of $Perl fame) -- The man who invented a universe and a culture "to reach a goal", as it is the mantra of "the hacker", to "do everything to reach a goal"

Hacker Interviews: Larry Wall