[SP-pm] Entrevista com Ward Cunningham

[Nelson Ferraz]

"I will admit that I was a Smalltalk zealot, and I believed that
Smalltalk could be the only language, and I knew about a dozen reasons
why, and one of them was that once everybody programmed in Smalltalk,
we would all communicate with objects. But that didn't happen. And the
day that I gave up on that vision, I said, "You know what, we're all
going to communicate with text files. We're all going to go ripping
through these text files plundering them for whatever information we
can infer from it."

That's when I picked up Perl. And it shocked me, just how well it
worked for finding and plundering files because it had those reg exes
built in and stuff like that. And it was so fast. It was fast to
compile, it was fast to develop, it was fast to run. I could not
believe it was so fast. And I know people like to complain about it,
but I also thought it showed a tremendous amount of insight. It was
insight, and I looked at it and I said, "Who would have thought of
making a language like that?" That's when I realized that open source
was here to stay. There is no commercial endeavor that ever would have
invented Perl.

But Perl was my escape from object-oriented programming, and I still
use it today. Probably a day doesn't go by that I don't just pick up
Perl right at the command line just because idiomatically I can write
commands. I know there's a command in UNIX but rather than go the
command page and try to remember the options, I just write it from
scratch in Perl. You know, I go on and finish the line. I know Perl
well enough that I can do that. I think if you write big programs you
know stuff that I never bothered to learn about Perl."

A entrevista é ótima, vale a pena ler do começo ao fim:

http://www.drdobbs.com/architecture-and-design/240000393