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Comment by aaronbrethorst | Hacker News Reader

What on earth was the point of the quote that introduced this release? It felt like a retread of Andreessen's famous "poorly debugged set of device drivers" line. Are we still on Slashdot? Is it 2005? Hot grits! Natalie Portman!

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In short: Larry started it by quoting Lord of the Rings, later release managers rolled with it. They aren't necessarily reflective on the release or current issues, but mostly there because the release manager felt like it. For more detail: http://perl5.git.perl.org/perl.git/blob/HEAD:/Porting/epigra...

Seems like a tradition of the Perl folks:

http://www.nntp.perl.org/group/perl.perl5.porters/2012/05/ms...

The Chuck Moore quote is especially ironic given what Perl represents in the programming language design space...

Point or not, I actually found it interesting. Quoting part of the quote:

You’ve got gigabyte disks; you’ve got megabyte RAMs.

The book this appears in was published 2009, though the interview with Chuck Moore surely happened somewhat earlier. But yay for triple order-of-magnitude improvements!

Don't forget "perl 6 is a mistake".

Yeah, it's pretty bizarre.

Was slashdot still relevant in 2005? Was perl? I feel like they both peaked right around the turn of the century.

This was funny.

Yesterday, cmccabe was snarky about subtle changes in versions of the Python/Ruby std libs. Today, he/she is snarky about a similar language, which really take backwards compatibility seriously. (Google darkpan/backpan for discussions.)

(But ok, he do seem to not have looked at Perl since the turn of the century.)

OK, I admit it was a cheap shot. But I'm not the only one in the thread making it. And the quote is definitely bizarre. Can you explain how it's related to Perl?

I agree that Perl has done a very good job with backwards compatibility. I have run many ancient Perl scripts that all work fine, and yes, CPAN is huge. I never liked the language, but that for other reasons, not worth going into here. Feel free to mod me down or whatever, just speaking what is on my mind.

> OK, I admit it was a cheap shot. But I'm not the only one in the thread making it.

"I wasn't the only one" is a very weak justification for actions.

Either way, why does the quote have to be related to Perl?

I've been reading Stroustroup's 4th Edition of TC++PL and it has quotes at the beginning of every chapter, not all of which pertain directly to C++. Is that not Stroustroup's right as the author to choose whichever quote he feels best appropriate?

>>OK, I admit it was a cheap shot. But I'm not the only one in the thread making it.

Thanks for making HN a bit more like bad Reddit today, with even more brainless language wars!

[Edit: Seriously, why even write if you have nothing to add but a "cheap shot" -- which is even written by others ("not the only one")!? Do you try to destroy this website?]

[Edit 2: I realize that the language wars idiots in some communities usually votes up comments like this about Perl, but take some damn responsibility for HN quality. Karma is not money.]

>>Can you explain how [the quote is] related to Perl?

If you're curious, please check the comment by Mithaldu, written before my first comment.

Were people still excited about Perl in 2005??!

I was excited about Perl for the first time when I learned it in about 2005. I was using perl to glue data and NCBI Blast to do some naive BioInfo pseudo research, from today's perspective.

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