EVENT
Trolling the Salzenberg
- Chip Salzenberg was the release "pumpking" for Perl 5.004, and he was remarkably adept at fixing bugs. There was a running joke in the community about "leaving the Salzenberg on overnight" because of how many bugs he would squash while everyone else slept.
- Right as Perl 5.004 release candidate 2 (rc2) was released, Chip announced that only critical "show-stoppers" would be accepted from that point forward.
- I decided to have a little fun. I jumped onto IRC and initiated a conversation with him:
- Me: "Congratulations on rc2!"
- Me: "Too bad about the coderef arrow, though."
- Chip: "What's that? Oh, the equivalent of arrayref and hashref dereferencing for coderefs. Too late though"
- Me: "Yeah, too bad. because Larry wanted it."
- Chip: "Larry wanted it?"
- [five minutes later] Chip: "It's a five-line code change, and it passes all tests. It's going in!"
- Intrigued and slightly trolled, Chip immediately got to work, wrote the change, verified it, and merged it into the final Perl 5.004 release!
- Only much later did I confess to Chip that my "recent" conversation with Larry Wall about him wanting the feature had actually occurred three years prior!
These facts are as Randal recalls them, but much time has passed for most of this. If you find a factual error, please email realmerlyn@gmail.com.