The State of the Onion 10

Welcome to the tenth State of the Perl Onion. For those of you who are unfamiliar with my methods, this is the annual speech wherein I ramble on about various things that are only marginally related to the state of Perl. I've gotten pretty good at rambling in my old age.

In the Scientific American that just came out, there's an article on chess experts, written by an expert, on what makes experts so expert. This expert claims that you can become an expert in just about anything if you study it persistently for ten years or so. So, since this is my tenth State of the Onion, maybe I'm about to become an expert in giving strange talks. One can only hope (not).

Speaking of chess, how many of you recognize this?

Does this help?

This is, of course, the mnemonic for the old Linnean taxonomy of biological classification.

Those of you who understand computers better than critters can think of these as nested namespaces.

This is all about describing nature, so naturally, different languages care about different levels.

For instance, PHP isn't much into taxonomy, so everything in PHP is just its own species in a flat namespace. Congratulations, this is your new species name:

Ruby, of course, is interested primarily in Classes.

Python, as the "anti-Perl," is heavily invested in maintaining Order.

Now, you might be smart enough to program in Haskell if you've received a MacArthur Genus award.

... used to be I couldn't spell "genus," and now I are one ...

Moving right along toward the other end of the spectrum, we have JavaScript that kind of believes in Phyla without believing in Classes.

And at the top of the heap, playing king of the mountain, we have languages like C# and Java. The kingdom of Java only has one species.

The kingdom of C# has many species, but they all look like C#.

Well, that leaves us with families.

I expect I have a pretty good excuse for thinking a lot about families lately, and here is my excuse:

This is Julian, my grandson. Julian, meet the open source hackers. Open source hackers, meet Julian.

Many of you will remember my daughter Heidi from previous OSCONs. A couple years ago she married Andy, and Julian is the result. I think he's a keeper. Julian, I mean.

Well, and Andy too.

Andy obviously has his priorities straight. I would certainly recommend him as a son-in-law to anyone. (Wait, that doesn't quite work ...)

There are many definitions of family, of course. Here's a mommy and a daddy truck. They live on a truck farm, and raise little trucks.

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