Thank you all for coming. I was hoping the title of this talk would scare away everyone who shouldn’t be here.

Obviously I should have made up a scarier title…

Perl meets Godzilla?

Bambi meets Perl?

I just did an interview for Feed Magazine. When I read their intro to it, I was interested to see that they made reference to my “curious speeches.” I’ll take that as a compliment. Why I take it as a compliment is the subject of this speech. That’s assuming this speech actually has a subject, which is still in doubt. Hey, at least it has a title. That’s something.

By the way, I’m planning to leave some amount of time at the end for Q and A, so you should start thinking about the Q part while I’m talking.

When I was invited to talk here, it occurred to me that most of the people here would be more interested in Linux than in Perl, so, in the interests of universal harmonic convergence, I thought I should talk about both Perl and Linux. To do that, I had to figure out what Perl and Linux have in common. Besides the obvious, of course.

Obviously, both Perl and Linux owe a lot to Unix culture, but this is well documented. If I merely pointed out the obvious commonalities, I’d have to talk the whole time about things you can find out from the manuals. (Or should I say, things you ought to be able to find out from the manuals? Whatever.)

I’m not here today to teach you how to use Perl or Linux. I’m not here to teach you what Perl or Linux are.

I’m here to talk about why Perl and Linux have both been so successful. Note that I’m measuring success here not so much in terms of numbers of users, but in terms of satisfaction of users.

So I started thinking about deeper connections between Perl and Linux, and that led me to think more about the deeper reasons for writing software. And that led to the subject of this talk. I’m going to start off talking by about postmodernism. After that, I’ll switch to talking about postmodernism. And at the conclusion, I’ll return to the subject of postmodernism.

However, since this talk is itself a postmodern work of art, I’ll be dragging in all sort of other cool things along the way, so maybe you won’t fall asleep.

Nowadays people are actually somewhat jaded by the term “postmodern”. Well, perhaps jaded is an understatement. Nauseated might be more like it. But, anyway, I still distinctly remember the first time I heard it back in the ’70s. I think my jaw fell and bounced off the floor several times. To me it was utterly inconceivable that anything could follow modern. Isn’t the very idea of “modern” always associated with the ideas “new” and “now”?

I do not believe it is wrong to aspire to greatness, if greatness is properly defined. Greatness does not imply goodness. The President is not intrisically “gooder” than a baby. He merely has more options for exercising creativity, for good or for ill.

True greatness is measured by how much freedom you give to others, not by how much you can coerce others to do what you want. I remember praying a prayer when I was very young, not much more than a baby myself. “God is great. God is good. Let us thank him for our food. Amen.” Well, I’m here to say amen to that. God’s greatness and goodness are measured by the fact that he gives us choices. He doesn’t require us to thank him for our food. (In case you hadn’t noticed.) God is not a Modernist. He doesn’t view us as nails. God expects us to behave like carpenters. Indeed, he gave us a carpenter as an example.

So I think God is postmodern. He has his own ideas of what rules, and what sucks, and he doesn’t expect everyone else to agree with him. Mind you, he likes it when people agree with him. I like it when people agree with me about Perl. But I don’t expect everyone to agree with me. Of course, some of my loyal followers expect everyone to agree with me. I try to think of it as an endearing characteristic. Personally, I think the Perl slogan, There’s More Than One Way To Do It, applies outside of Perl as well as inside. I explicitly give people the freedom not to use Perl, just as God gives people the freedom to go to the devil if they so choose.

More… http://www.wall.org/~larry/pm.html