LWN: Interview: Larry Wall

“In this interview, Larry discusses a wide range of topics,
including his job at O’Reilly, Perl certification, the
commercialization of Perl, competition between open source
projects, the power of laziness, Perl 6, post-modernism, software
patents, documentation, and more….”

“Would you call yourself a full-time developer?”

“LW: That’s a difficult question to answer. I’m just paid to do
whatever I want to do. Some of the time it’s development, and some
of the time it’s just goofing off, some of the time it’s learning
more about the world so I can figure out where Perl ought to be
going, some of the time it’s coming and getting talks at the
conferences… Most of the development is actually done by other
people now :-)….”

“Perl development is said to be started with the power of
laziness, but what power do you think make the development going
right now?”

“LW: Oh, good question… Hmmm… I think it’s still laziness.
Laziness on a different level. When Perl first was developed, it
was laziness to get particular small jobs done quickly. But now,
people don’t want to have to use Perl plus other things. If there
is a job that really ought to be written in C++ or Java or Ruby or
Python or something like that, but they like Perl, and Perl may not
be the best tool yet for it, but they would like it to be.”

“So rather than learning a different language, they just want to
extend Perl toward what is better for that. So I think it’s still
laziness :-)”

Complete
Story