There are (at least) two shibboleths in the realm of Perl: manipulexity and whipuptitude. If you understand the meaning (and value) of these concepts, you're one of us. If you can't, you're not.
These terms were coined by Larry, and woven into his presentation at the Atlanta Linux Showcase, Camel Lot #6. Larry presented this talk in October 2000, shortly after the Perl6 announcement, and it describes some of his early thoughts on Perl6.
Manipulexity is the property where, starting from zero and a couple of simple tools and slowly hand-craft a complex solution to a complex problem. Like programming in C. Your tools are cc, libc and other C libraries.
Whipuptitude is the property where, starting from zero with a large library of easily combined tools, you quickly hack a solution to a moderately simple, but annoyingly tedious problem that occurs frequently. Like writing a shell script. Your tools are sh / ksh / bash / csh, sort, grep, sed, awk, ps and so on.
If you plot manipulexity on the vertical axis and whipuptitude on the horizontal axis, there is a great void in the middle through the upper right -- problems that need high whipuptitude (easier to write than C), and high manipulexity (more complexity than you can tolerate in a shell script). Perl was designed to hit this sweet spot. Perl6 is targeted at expanding Perl's scope within this sweet spot -- more manipulexity and more whipuptitude than we have today.
I went googling for these terms earlier today. Google didn't find much, and didn't know where these terms came from (or what they mean). I found a source for these terms, along with slides, a transcription and MP3 of the presentation.
Maybe next time it'll find something. ;-)
Re:failed search
ziggy on 2005-08-10T02:56:34
D'Oh! Fixed, thanks.
