I’m here to talk about why Perl and Linux have both been so successful.
I still feel like I have to justify Perl all the time to a lot of people.
The Modernist believes in OR more than AND. Postmodernists believe in AND more than OR. … At least we can use Perl as an example. In Perl, AND has higher precedence than OR does. There you have it. That proves Perl is a postmodern language.
I picked the feature set of Perl because I thought they were cool features. I left the other ones behind because I thought they sucked.
When’s the last time you used duct tape on a duct?
One of the characteristics of a postmodern computer language is that it puts the focus not so much onto the problem to be solved, but rather onto the person trying to solve the problem.
The very fact that it’s possible to write messy programs in Perl is also what makes it possible to write programs that are cleaner in Perl than they could ever be in a language that attempts to enforce cleanliness.
We’re not objective about Perl, but as postmodernists, we freely admit that we’re not objective, and we try to compensate for it when we want people to think we’re objective. Or when we want to think ourselves objective. Or, at least, not objectionable.
We’ve actually been doing open source for a couple of decades now. Why is it suddenly taking off now? Why not twenty years ago. Linux could have been written twenty years ago, albeit not by Linus.
As Heidi would say: ‘Tsall good. Except when it sucks.
