"That Goes Without Saying (or Does It)". It didn't!

I spent the time to watch a talk from Larry Wall the Perl, and now Perl 6 author; where he is using the Rosetta Code site for what it was built for - comparing programming language design, by examples.

Unfortunately he was preaching to his acolytes so there is no meat to the talk. Larry says 'X' about a language compared to Perl or Perl 6 and the audience accepts without even asking for clarifications. Argument never enters their minds.

What he did do well is to show examples first from the Root mean square page and indicate how anyone can compare and contrast languages using it. Larry then categorized Spiral matrix and Zigzag matrix as tasks whose examples in Perl where "fun to write" which I liked as I remember getting a lot out of Zigzag when I first found RC, so much so that I think starting the new task "Spiral matrix" was probably the first task I wrote for RC. (I thought it would be good to learn by doing a variant of an existing task).

Larry showed extended versions of the zigzag and spiral matrix solutions that used text based turtle graphics to animate the solutions.

In summary, his language comparisons were droopy; his use of RC - spot on!