Larry Wall's State of The Onion 9

Every year at PerlCon (now called OSCON because they let Python and Ruby people attend) Larry Wall gives an address about the state of Perl. He usually brings up some crazy analogy. This year is no different except it was even more inscrutable to people outside the Perl community than ever.

Let me save you a butt-load of time. Don’t read the whole thing. Skip to the last page, which is the only page that isn’t fluff.

And there are two take-home lessons from that. The first is that, as an open source author, you should be quick to try to make someone else’s half-built wheel better, and slow to try to make your own. We’re making progress in this realm in the Perl community, but I don’t think any open source community ever gets good enough at harmonizing the dissimilar interests that sometimes lead to project forks. We can always improve there.

The second take-home lesson is this. Pity your poor intelligence analyst back at headquarters. He’s not all that intelligent, after all. The intelligence of the intelligence community is distributed, and it’s often the Tinas and the Wheelbarrows of the world that know when they’ve got a piece of hot information. But somehow that meta-information gets lost on transmission back to headquarters.

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