Heh. I both date and isolate myself with American pop. :P Quint is the boat captain from Jaws. There is a community meeting going on about ONOES, WAT DO? getting out of hand, lots of cross-talk, no progress or focus. From out of the din: …SCREEEEE… Quint has the floor.
Orwant's bio from O'Reilly: a well-known member of the Perl community, founded "The Perl Journal" and co-authored O'Reilly's bestseller, Programming Perl, 3rd Edition. There was a meeting of Perl luminaries at a 2000 conference discussing what to do about Perl's faltering. SMASH! CRASH! BAM! KAPOW…! Orwant has the floor; Larry describes it–
We spent the first hour gabbing about all sorts of political and organizational issues of a fairly boring and mundane nature. Partway
through, Jon Orwant comes in, and stands there for a few minutes
listening, and then he very calmly walks over to the coffee service
table in the corner, and there were about 20 of us in the room, and he
picks up a coffee mug and throws it against the other wall and he
keeps throwing coffee mugs against the other wall, and he says "we are
fucked unless we can come up with something that will excite the
community, because everyone's getting bored and going off and doing
other things".
And he was right. His motivation was, perhaps, to make bigger Perl
conferences, or he likes Perl doing well, or something like that. But
in actual fact he was right, so that sort of galvanized the meeting.
He said "I don't care what you do, but you gotta do something big."
And then he went away.
That was the moment the spark of Perl6 happened. I wish that call to arms had been channeled differently… hindsight being items in rearview mirror are closer than they appear and all; then again, how, who, what? So. 18 years later, here we, well, a good few of us still and some new friends, are. :P
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