"I will admit that I was a Smalltalk zealot, and I believed that Smalltalk could be the only language, and I knew about a dozen reasons why, and one of them was that once everybody programmed in Smalltalk, we would all communicate with objects. But that didn't happen. And the day that I gave up on that vision, I said, "You know what, we're all going to communicate with text files. We're all going to go ripping through these text files plundering them for whatever information we can infer from it."
That's when I picked up Perl. And it shocked me, just how well it worked for finding and plundering files because it had those reg exes built in and stuff like that. And it was so fast. It was fast to compile, it was fast to develop, it was fast to run. I could not believe it was so fast. And I know people like to complain about it, but I also thought it showed a tremendous amount of insight. It was insight, and I looked at it and I said, "Who would have thought of making a language like that?" That's when I realized that open source was here to stay. There is no commercial endeavor that ever would have invented Perl. But Perl was my escape from object-oriented programming, and I still use it today. Probably a day doesn't go by that I don't just pick up Perl right at the command line just because idiomatically I can write commands. I know there's a command in UNIX but rather than go the command page and try to remember the options, I just write it from scratch in Perl. You know, I go on and finish the line. I know Perl well enough that I can do that. I think if you write big programs you know stuff that I never bothered to learn about Perl." A entrevista é ótima, vale a pena ler do começo ao fim: http://www.drdobbs.com/architecture-and-design/240000393 =begin disclaimer Sao Paulo Perl Mongers: http://sao-paulo.pm.org/ SaoPaulo-pm mailing list: SaoPaulo-pm@pm.org L<http://mail.pm.org/mailman/listinfo/saopaulo-pm> =end disclaimer
