Wall on language history

Larry Wall’s most recent State of the Onion on perl.com gives an interesting rundown of his experience with scripting languages. No Perl experience required to get the history lesson. His description of PHP is especially good:

We’ve also seen the rise of PHP, which takes the worse-is-better approach to dazzling new depths, as it were. By and large PHP seems to be making the same progression of mistakes as early Perl did, only slower.

HAMMER status, and scheduling

Matthew Dillon described the state of his distributed filesystem, saying a simple version should be up and runnable by next week, with actual clusters (meaning multiple disk blocks, not separate systems) supported some time after.

Also, the next regular 6-month release (2.0!) will probably be pushed out a little to mid-January 2008, so the release isn’t happening at the same time as everyone’s holiday plans.