Part I. Culture
In this section, six articles provide glimpses into the aesthetics of Perl. The articles touch on music, art, style, conversation, and the lifestyle of the lazy, impatient, and hubristic, in which appliances do the programmer’s bidding.
We begin with the first article from the first issue of TPJ: an essay by Perl creator Larry Wall that compares programming languages to music. Two sentences from his article have always resonated with me:
In trying to make programming predictable, computer scientists have mostly succeeded in making it boring.
and:
LISP has all the visual appeal of oatmeal with fingernail clippings mixed in.
Personally, I like LISP, and agree with those who think that its Scheme dialect is ideal for teaching computer science. But reading Larry’s sentiments made me realize why I defected from LISP to Perl: programming languages shouldn’t make everything look the same. When all code looks identical, programming becomes a matter of rote instead of a creative act of literary expression. It is that creativity that gave Perl its culture, and is what gave rise to the topics covered throughout this book, from the Obfuscated Perl contest to error messages delivered in haiku.
Next, photographer Alan Blount chronicles the 20 TPJ covers. Alan’s artwork sometimes sparked more reader mail than the magazine content. The lack of visuals inside the magazine made the external appearance of the magazine all ...
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