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Oh man, this brings back memories. Larry Wall is a wonderful human who I had the privilege of meeting back in college. He came out for a summer tech conferenc

Oh man, this brings back memories. Larry Wall is a wonderful human who I had the privilege of meeting back in college. He came out for a summer tech conference we were hosting and was the keynote speaker. When we broke out into small groups he was in mine and we chatted a bit. He was the first internet famous person I had ever met - kind and unassuming, and also the creator of something highly successful in the Perl programming language. Perl was one of the original web languages and the Swiss Army knife of scrappy programmers and sysadmins everywhere. It was a direct influence on many more recent programming languages, including Python and Ruby to name a few. My friends and I discovered this very own home page back around the time I met him some 10 years ago. It was where I first learned the word "chartreuse", and I'm still not fully sure what color that refers to. You can find some of his writings under the "My Ravings" section, which are a hoot. One of my favorites of his writings is The Three Virtues of a programmer (http://threevirtues.com/ http://threevirtues.com/): Laziness: The quality that makes you go to great effort to reduce overall energy expenditure. It makes you write labor-saving programs that other people will find useful and document what you wrote so you don't have to answer so many questions about it. Impatience: The anger you feel when the computer is being lazy. This makes you write programs that don't just react to your needs, but actually anticipate them. Or at least pretend to. Hubris: The quality that makes you write (and maintain) programs that other people won't want to say bad things about.

miluge 8y ago
Chartreuse is a kind of green-ish color, it comes for the drink! Go to France and ask it as a digestif it's great ( but gives me terrible headaches ). And thanks for the three rules maybe now I might explain my manager why my laziness is good
- jmcomets 8y ago
  Chartreuse comes from the Alps (Isère), and was brewed by the monks of the Grande-Chartreuse. The drink's history is pretty interesting to read about[1]. There are actually two kinds of Chartreuse, one green (easiest to find) and one yellow. The recipe supposedly containing over 100 medicinal herbs, Chartreuse was originally sold as a "health elixir" rather than a digestif. To this day the recipe is still held secret in the monastery, although production has scaled up. As you may have guessed, it's one of my favorite liqueurs and has become my go-to "last drink" (after a big meal, when my guests leave). Also, if you ever go skiing in the Alps, you can mess with the locals of Savoie by asking for a Chartreuse rather than a Genepi[2], a similar drink from there. [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chartreuse_(liqueur) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chartreuse_(liqueur) [2]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/G%C3%A9n%C3%A9pi https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/G%C3%A9n%C3%A9pi
  - dmos62 8y ago
    The drink [0] is actually still kind of produced by the monks. The brothers Chartreux, who have all taken vows of silence by the way, collect the medicinal herbs in their remote mountain valley where they live. They live in a castle [1] that looks like something out of the Harry Potter franchise by the way. Each of them has his own multistory rowhouse. Anyway, the herbs they collect make up the mixture, which makes up the drink, then it is brought to the nearby distillery where it is distilled. What's changed from the old days is that they don't do the distilling in the monastery. And there's actually still a Chartreuse "health elixir" [2], me and my partner buy them for our grandmas. It comes in little bottles that are put in a wooden cast-sort-of thing that opens like a matroska. You drink one teaspoon at a time, it's around 60 degrees, it has a different herb mixture, and I think it has less sugar. If you're ever around that region of the alps, the valley of the monastery is a nice place to hike. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chartreuse_(liqueur) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chartreuse_(liqueur) [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grande_Chartreuse https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grande_Chartreuse [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chartreuse_(liqueur)#/media/File:Chartreuse_ElixirVegetal_400th71%25.jpg https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chartreuse_(liqueur)#/media/Fi...
    - cicero 8y ago
      There is a great documentary [1] about the Grande Chartreuse, available on DVD [2]. 1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Into_Great_Silence https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Into_Great_Silence 2: https://www.amazon.com/Into-Great-Silence-Two-Disc-Set/dp/B000OYNVOY https://www.amazon.com/Into-Great-Silence-Two-Disc-Set/dp/B0...
      - dmos62 8y ago
        It's on Youtube [0], though the quality is lacking. Thanks for sharing this! [0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fgfU_RRNYkw https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fgfU_RRNYkw
- SmellyGeekBoy 8y ago
  You could just quote Bill Gates ;) https://www.goodreads.com/quotes/568877-i-choose-a-lazy-person-to-do-a-hard-job https://www.goodreads.com/quotes/568877-i-choose-a-lazy-pers...
- dwighttk 8y ago
  also, it's the background color for his page
- tuckermi 8y ago
  It is also the background color of the page in question if you are looking for a visual example.
- pvaldes 8y ago
  You can also have it in feline format as a stone gray coloured little beast with yellow/orange eyes: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chartreux https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chartreux (I wonder if Mr Wall is a dog person or a cat person type. I just realize now that having a cat stomping around could explain the look of some perl code... mmhh)
beat 8y ago
I learned Perl 4 back in the mid-1990s, before the massive piles of cruft got bolted on that turned it in to Perl 5. It was basically just glorified sed/awk meets shell script in a single process, and it was awesome. As a junior programmer, I had to do some maintenance work on a couple of daemons written in C that were just launchers for other programs. A couple thousand lines of messy, badly structured C. So I had the clever idea to just rewrite them in Perl. Suddenly they were 50 lines, easy to read, robust, and had really useful logging. Perl 4 also spoke Sybase really well, which made it our reporting tool of choice. We could grab whatever from our Sybase databases, and format nice printed/screen reports easily in Perl. I was really excited when Perl 5 came out, but ugh. I wound up writing about 10,000 lines of it at a dotcom, and it was so, so ugly. All the stuff that made 50 line Perl 4 beautiful made 10,000 line Perl 5 an unreadable mess. Worse, there were three of us writing it, so consistent coding standards were a big challenge. I don't use Perl anymore for anything but one-liner fancy greps on the command line. If I have to write an actual script, it'll either be plain sh/ksh/bash, or Python or Ruby if it needs structure. I'm not going to waste my brain trying to write readable code in Perl anymore.
- JackFr 8y ago
  That mirrors my Perl experience exactly. In the early nineties it was a force multiplier, and then it seemingly just imploded in on itself.
  - emilper 8y ago
    It was a force multiplier when comparing with C, C++ or BASH. Perl 5 saved Perl from itself, too bad Perl 3/4 lovers kept writing Perl 3 years after 2000 until they saw the light and the truth and moved to Python.
- masukomi 8y ago
  > I was really excited when Perl 5 came out, but ugh. I wound up writing about 10,000 lines of it at a dotcom, and it was so, so ugly. All the stuff that made 50 line Perl 4 beautiful made 10,000 line Perl 5 an unreadable mess. I find that Perl gets a bad rap for being "unreadable". In my experience the readability of Perl is the direct result of the discipline of the person writing it. It's not hard to write readable, maintainable Perl 5, but it's _easy_ to write _crap_ Perl 5. So, you have to be disciplined in how you create things.
hzoo 8y ago
I also really liked the follow up on the three virtues, in the 2nd State of the Onion (http://www.wall.org/~larry/onion/onion.html http://www.wall.org/~larry/onion/onion.html) > Most of you are familiar with the virtues of a programmer. There are three, of course: laziness, impatience, and hubris. > These are virtues of passion. They are not, however, virtues of community. The virtues of community sound like their opposites: diligence, patience, and humility. > They're not really opposites, because you can do them all at the same time. It's another matter of perspective. These are the virtues that have brought us this far. These are the virtues that will carry our community into the future, if we do not abandon them.
atombender 8y ago
> ... the word "chartreuse", and I'm still not fully sure what color that refers to. Take a look at the background colour of the web site that this thread is about. :-)
tptacek 8y ago
Cool fact about chartreuse: it's a color named for a liqueur.

miluge 8y ago

Chartreuse is a kind of green-ish color, it comes for the drink! Go to France and ask it as a digestif it's great ( but gives me terrible headaches ). And thanks for the three rules maybe now I might explain my manager why my laziness is good

jmcomets 8y ago
Chartreuse comes from the Alps (Isère), and was brewed by the monks of the Grande-Chartreuse. The drink's history is pretty interesting to read about[1]. There are actually two kinds of Chartreuse, one green (easiest to find) and one yellow. The recipe supposedly containing over 100 medicinal herbs, Chartreuse was originally sold as a "health elixir" rather than a digestif. To this day the recipe is still held secret in the monastery, although production has scaled up. As you may have guessed, it's one of my favorite liqueurs and has become my go-to "last drink" (after a big meal, when my guests leave). Also, if you ever go skiing in the Alps, you can mess with the locals of Savoie by asking for a Chartreuse rather than a Genepi[2], a similar drink from there. [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chartreuse_(liqueur) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chartreuse_(liqueur) [2]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/G%C3%A9n%C3%A9pi https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/G%C3%A9n%C3%A9pi
- dmos62 8y ago
  The drink [0] is actually still kind of produced by the monks. The brothers Chartreux, who have all taken vows of silence by the way, collect the medicinal herbs in their remote mountain valley where they live. They live in a castle [1] that looks like something out of the Harry Potter franchise by the way. Each of them has his own multistory rowhouse. Anyway, the herbs they collect make up the mixture, which makes up the drink, then it is brought to the nearby distillery where it is distilled. What's changed from the old days is that they don't do the distilling in the monastery. And there's actually still a Chartreuse "health elixir" [2], me and my partner buy them for our grandmas. It comes in little bottles that are put in a wooden cast-sort-of thing that opens like a matroska. You drink one teaspoon at a time, it's around 60 degrees, it has a different herb mixture, and I think it has less sugar. If you're ever around that region of the alps, the valley of the monastery is a nice place to hike. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chartreuse_(liqueur) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chartreuse_(liqueur) [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grande_Chartreuse https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grande_Chartreuse [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chartreuse_(liqueur)#/media/File:Chartreuse_ElixirVegetal_400th71%25.jpg https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chartreuse_(liqueur)#/media/Fi...
  - cicero 8y ago
    There is a great documentary [1] about the Grande Chartreuse, available on DVD [2]. 1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Into_Great_Silence https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Into_Great_Silence 2: https://www.amazon.com/Into-Great-Silence-Two-Disc-Set/dp/B000OYNVOY https://www.amazon.com/Into-Great-Silence-Two-Disc-Set/dp/B0...
    - dmos62 8y ago
      It's on Youtube [0], though the quality is lacking. Thanks for sharing this! [0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fgfU_RRNYkw https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fgfU_RRNYkw
SmellyGeekBoy 8y ago
You could just quote Bill Gates ;) https://www.goodreads.com/quotes/568877-i-choose-a-lazy-person-to-do-a-hard-job https://www.goodreads.com/quotes/568877-i-choose-a-lazy-pers...
dwighttk 8y ago
also, it's the background color for his page
tuckermi 8y ago
It is also the background color of the page in question if you are looking for a visual example.
pvaldes 8y ago
You can also have it in feline format as a stone gray coloured little beast with yellow/orange eyes: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chartreux https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chartreux (I wonder if Mr Wall is a dog person or a cat person type. I just realize now that having a cat stomping around could explain the look of some perl code... mmhh)

beat 8y ago

I learned Perl 4 back in the mid-1990s, before the massive piles of cruft got bolted on that turned it in to Perl 5. It was basically just glorified sed/awk meets shell script in a single process, and it was awesome. As a junior programmer, I had to do some maintenance work on a couple of daemons written in C that were just launchers for other programs. A couple thousand lines of messy, badly structured C. So I had the clever idea to just rewrite them in Perl. Suddenly they were 50 lines, easy to read, robust, and had really useful logging. Perl 4 also spoke Sybase really well, which made it our reporting tool of choice. We could grab whatever from our Sybase databases, and format nice printed/screen reports easily in Perl. I was really excited when Perl 5 came out, but ugh. I wound up writing about 10,000 lines of it at a dotcom, and it was so, so ugly. All the stuff that made 50 line Perl 4 beautiful made 10,000 line Perl 5 an unreadable mess. Worse, there were three of us writing it, so consistent coding standards were a big challenge. I don't use Perl anymore for anything but one-liner fancy greps on the command line. If I have to write an actual script, it'll either be plain sh/ksh/bash, or Python or Ruby if it needs structure. I'm not going to waste my brain trying to write readable code in Perl anymore.

JackFr 8y ago
That mirrors my Perl experience exactly. In the early nineties it was a force multiplier, and then it seemingly just imploded in on itself.
- emilper 8y ago
  It was a force multiplier when comparing with C, C++ or BASH. Perl 5 saved Perl from itself, too bad Perl 3/4 lovers kept writing Perl 3 years after 2000 until they saw the light and the truth and moved to Python.
masukomi 8y ago
> I was really excited when Perl 5 came out, but ugh. I wound up writing about 10,000 lines of it at a dotcom, and it was so, so ugly. All the stuff that made 50 line Perl 4 beautiful made 10,000 line Perl 5 an unreadable mess. I find that Perl gets a bad rap for being "unreadable". In my experience the readability of Perl is the direct result of the discipline of the person writing it. It's not hard to write readable, maintainable Perl 5, but it's _easy_ to write _crap_ Perl 5. So, you have to be disciplined in how you create things.

hzoo 8y ago

I also really liked the follow up on the three virtues, in the 2nd State of the Onion (http://www.wall.org/~larry/onion/onion.html http://www.wall.org/~larry/onion/onion.html) > Most of you are familiar with the virtues of a programmer. There are three, of course: laziness, impatience, and hubris. > These are virtues of passion. They are not, however, virtues of community. The virtues of community sound like their opposites: diligence, patience, and humility. > They're not really opposites, because you can do them all at the same time. It's another matter of perspective. These are the virtues that have brought us this far. These are the virtues that will carry our community into the future, if we do not abandon them.

atombender 8y ago

> ... the word "chartreuse", and I'm still not fully sure what color that refers to. Take a look at the background colour of the web site that this thread is about. :-)

tptacek 8y ago

Cool fact about chartreuse: it's a color named for a liqueur.