We were halfway through starting writing Perl 6 when the drugs took hold. Suddenly the code started shifting and crawling, taking on a life of its own. We knew at that point that the community was about to explode.
Was is the completely off the mark trollers blithely parrotting that Parrot was going to be a dead project? Was it the keen perl5'ers lurking in #perl6, hoping to learn through sheer osmosis, like those self-contradicting yuppy women that leech onto young boys who cause their mind to suffer from severe stack overflow spewing their relevating, new age ideas?
It sure sounds like they know what they're talking about. So the new wave programming whores have come out in full force, eager to move on from their pathetic states of programming decay caused by a collective state of being comparable to a stagnation of chi in the liver, antagonised by unhealthy dependancies on every upper from caffiene to guarana and methamphetamine, steeped in the minimum level of alcoholism that our society permits, and of course the unavoidable overexposure to php, asp, and the associated talking lemmings twitting all day long. Thankfully those fools have managed to cage their own progress in interfaces composed of nothing but straws and papier mâchè, glued together with jism.
Those who could see the zombie programmers rising and seeking something new kept quiet - there's nothing more uncomfortable than duking it out with an argumentative Perl programmer who thinks that being "Lazy" means "don't worry about research or personal development". The masters looked at each other nervously, hoping that the young initiates would fend off the trollers and bring them into line. Affection is flattering, unless the beast in question happens to be a hungry vampire bat.
Were they really zombies? Or was that just the paranoia from a residual level of tetrahydrocannibinol reacting with a system so abused by years of smoking, snorting, licking, dropping, injecting, every manner of perl 5 idiom into your codestream ... bending your mind at every opportunity, you've been waiting so long for the itching pain that's been driving you mad, and has been endemic throughout CPAN to be released ...
There were the other cute little languages that came along. One part of you gets that hungry feeling for something new, but just can't stomach the concept of another BNF language, no matter how many features from those mind-bending computer science geek functional languages like LISP and Haskell. Am I not the only person who's functional programming is disfunctional? Finally, a path forward !
I think back to the programming task I am being paid to do, a persistent naggle interfering with my real work. The first stage is complete of training my boss that the interconnected nature of open source requires some tasks to first be completed that are, shall we say not obviously related to the project at hand. But just because the link is not apparent to the untrained eye, does not mean that there is no link! No, this is a sure sign of a truly inspired programmer...
For in the words of one of the greatest songwrights of our time, "the difference between genius and insanity is measured only by success".
