Re: poll ideas quest 2010

[apl]

in reply to poll ideas quest 2010

The science fiction writer who most personifies Perl is:

• Robert Heinlein (for writing The Man Who Was Too Lazy to Fail)
• Charlie Stross (for being a Perl programmer])
• Vernor Vinge (computer scientist, who shows us TIMTOWTDI)
• other

Please help. I'm grasping at straws, trying to think of connections between SF writers and Perl / qualities of Perl ...

[Ratazong]

• Douglas Adams (The universe is the result of some (perl) obfuscation contest ;-)

[Illuminatus]

• Stanislaw Lem for writing The Cyberiad, coining the term 'constructor' in 1967. Plus, I'm sure at least one of the protagonists (Trurl) used Perl
• Roger Zelazny for writing Jack of Shadows, where the protagonist uses a computer program to solve a mystical problem. While perl is not mentioned by name, I have no doubt that it would have been Jack's language of choice
• Larry Niven for a central premise in his Known Space universe, that aliens (in this case Puppeteers) secretly bred humans for 'luckiness', as this was their best trait. Given the number regexp questions asked in SoPW, it was prescient in its validation of "it's better to be lucky than good"

fnord

[trurl]

Stanislaw Lem for writing The Cyberiad, coining the term 'constructor' in 1967.

Wait, what? How could he coin that term? He didn't even write in English.

[Illuminatus]

you say potato... When it was translated to English in 1972, that's the word they used for whatever Polish word occurred in the original. I am completely ignorant of Polish, however, so I cannot say whether the word Lem used in his book is the same one current Polish programmers use when talking about OOP.

fnord