Boxing in the LLRing

[mattr]

Esteemed Monks,

Last week I participated in a gathering of 300 developers in Tokyo called the Lightweight Language Ring (LLRing), held in a real boxing ring. It included a number of famous Japanese programmers, the creator of Ruby, a bot shootout, language updates, a panel on functional programming, and more. So I'd like to invite you to read Boxing in the LLRing.

The first half of the 4500 word article is more accessible to non-experts while the second half gets into more nitty gritty. Coverage of the Perl language update, bunches of Haskell and Javascript, a surprise announcement that Ruby's Matz is going to go into hiding to work on Yet Another Ruby VM (get that guy onto Parrot!!), and a mysterious connection between the naming of Ruby and Python, a talk at YAPC::Asia 2006 Tokyo in March, and the location of the good humored "boxing match" (The TCP/IP bot battle was in fact chaired by Shibuya Perl Mongers). See also the photos on Flickr)

And finally I attempted a followup of the YAPC presentation on Babel-17, which was a comparison of Perl to Ruby to psychoactive scifi computing languages... But I don't want to ruin the ending, please come over and take a look, and help me correct any mistakes! Anyway seemed like a good reason to finally install a blog of my own.

Even though the number of languages and frameworks exceeds twenty, it is certainly about Perl and many issues thought about by monks, especially how languages change the way you think about problems. The event site is all in Japanese, unlike the site for YAPC::Asia, but I found it an interesting look at Japanese developers, and that it includes many of the Japan-side stars of the recent YAPC may be of interest to people who came all the way to Japan for it (Larry, Damian and Ingie among others came in March).

Even though it is lengthy I don't have anywhere in particular to post it besides PerlMonks, so if anyone has a good idea about that I'd like as many people as possible to contribute to an English language discussion of some of the things that were covered at LLRing. Especially now that Perl is advancing and Parrot and Pugs are on the rise, I hope you agree it is timely. Looking forward to your comments!

[Anonymous Monk]

I say similar things about Takahashi's YAPC comparison of ruby with Babel-17 (http://www.rubycolor.org/takahashi/yapc2006) at http://use.perl.org/~mr_bean/journal/29899

It was difficult for me to tell how serious he was discouraging use of ruby because of its effects on thinking. Perhaps this was my lack of understanding of the joke rather than the mythical/proverbial Japanese ambiguity.

(Oh, it was a joke?)

I write about the Takahashi method at http://use.perl.org/~mr_bean/journal/29948

What is the minimum implication of the linking of the 2 major non-perl dynamic 'scripting' languages with wrestling foreseen by Delany, if it is not a complete coincidence?

That the Japanese organizers of LLRing also read Delany?

What is the minimum implication of the linking of the 2 major non-perl dynamic languages, aside from the wrestling link, foreseen by Delany, if it is not a complete coincidence?

That the accounts we have of the naming of those 2 languages is not completely correct? That the explanations we have of the naming underdetermines the naming process? Perhaps the 2 language creators aren't completely aware of why they named the languages the way they did, and the accounts they gave us are a rationalization.

I wonder if it is possible to find any other amazing links like this. Search for close associations of the names of the 2 languages in non-computer contexts?

I have my own example of an amazing coincidence with perl. I had a student here in Taiwan who looked like Audrey Tang, but whose English name was Larry.

I thought, This student will go places.

Edited by planetscape - linkified link and added rudimentary formatting

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[mattr]

Hi, and thanks for a great reply! Seems I get very few replies but they are all from great people and quite to the point. I think you're right on both your posts, though I could add that also Takahashi's presentation format was quite enjoyable to me even though it is difficult to follow rapid fire Japanese, it seemed a pleasant mix of rap, humor and wit. (All in good humor though perhaps there should have been a *very* lengthy English translation below the few kanji, which would have been more useful and even funnier.)

That, and also I think his technique was transmitted to other YAPC attendees who for some braindead reason vied to shave the amount of time left before their presentation to actually create the presentation. Apparently Javascript and xul are quite handy here. Probably happening at YAPC::EU too?

Okay, so taking your delightful post very seriously, of course you make it very hard by disallowing the possibility that it is a complete coincidence.

Also python and ruby seem to be very strong names, i.e. for snake and garnet. And green and red go well together, and as I found on Google a python piece of jewelry is apt to have eyes made of rubies. And cool names are running out. Also, dragons love to hoard gems. But I agree we must disallow coincidence, even if it is pushed bodily along by coginitive dissonance.

I would guess at a minimum, Ruby's creator (who also studied linguistics) has read Babel-17 twenty times and every time he sees the word Python he thinks of Ruby and Python in the null-grav wrestling sphere. Two other points from the novel are that the fighters have made massive enhancements to their bodies, grafting things on, and the other thing is that they are apparently mostly hyperspace pilots, since the only way to control these hyperships is to plug enhanced humans who can react by instinct, or sexually bonded trios who can handle more complex jobs than any one or two people can. No really, that is how the story goes. So there are some wierd parallels to all the "lightweight languages". Um, and lightweight <=> lighter than air <=> null-grav... GONNNGGG!! Ahem.

The minimum relation excluding the wrestling is I guess that he forgot about the wrestling part..? Well another is that maybe there is a cabal of elite intellectuals on a secret mission of world domination, flying from country to country to evangelize and share code, at popular conferences like YAPC and.. sshhh! Depends on your level of paranoia and knowledge.

Another explanation that could also be seen as minimal, and which I wanted to alude to in my article, is like the self-organizing structures we are finding at the nanoscale level these days. Did you read Carl Sagan's Contact? There is a great image that is totally cut out of the movie with Jodie Foster, in which engineers have been following alien instructions to build things and one of the inexplicable things that happens is they are instructed to pour a chemical into a swimming pool, and a mind-numingly complex, semi-alive red bronchial thing is created (added below FYI). Maybe we are all working towards something and these kinds of mysterious things will happen more and more reguarly, until, ...until... Poof!

As the first factories were built and the first prototypes produced, pessimism diminished about human ability to reconstruct an alien technology from a Message written in no known language. There was the heady feeling of arriving unprepared for a school test and finding that you can figure out the answers from your general education and your common sense. As in all competently designed examinations, taking it was a learning experience. All the first tests were passed: The erbium was of adequate purity; the pictured superstructure was left after the inorganic material was etched away by hydrofluoric acid; the rotor spun up as advertised. The Message flattered the scientists and engineers, critics said; they were becoming caught up in the technology and losing sight of the dangers. For the construction of one component, a particularly intricate set of organic chemical reactions was specified and the resulting product was introduced into a swimming pool-sized mixture of formaldehyde and aqueous ammonia. The mass grew, differentiated, specialized, and then just sat there -- exquisitely more complex than anything like it humans knew how to build. It had an intricately branched network of fine hollow tubes, through which perhaps some fluid was to circulate. It was colloidal, pulpy, dark red. It did not make copies of itself, but it was sufficiently biological to scare a great many people. They repeated the procedure and produced something apparently identical. How the end product could be significantly more complicated than the instructions that went into building it was a mystery.