[31607] in Perl-Users-Digest
Perl-Users Digest, Issue: 2866 Volume: 11
daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (Perl-Users Digest)
Thu Mar 11 00:14:23 2010
Date: Wed, 10 Mar 2010 21:14:12 -0800 (PST)
From: Perl-Users Digest <Perl-Users-Request@ruby.OCE.ORST.EDU>
To: Perl-Users@ruby.OCE.ORST.EDU (Perl-Users Digest)
Perl-Users Digest Wed, 10 Mar 2010 Volume: 11 Number: 2866
Today's topics:
Re: to RG - Lisp lunacy and Perl psychosis <jurgenex@hotmail.com>
Re: to RG - Lisp lunacy and Perl psychosis <tadmc@seesig.invalid>
Re: to RG - Lisp lunacy and Perl psychosis <jurgenex@hotmail.com>
Re: to RG - Lisp lunacy and Perl psychosis <cartercc@gmail.com>
Re: to RG - Lisp lunacy and Perl psychosis <rNOSPAMon@flownet.com>
Re: to RG - Lisp lunacy and Perl psychosis <cartercc@gmail.com>
Re: to RG - Lisp lunacy and Perl psychosis <tkpapp@gmail.com>
Re: to RG - Lisp lunacy and Perl psychosis <rNOSPAMon@flownet.com>
Re: to RG - Lisp lunacy and Perl psychosis <rNOSPAMon@flownet.com>
Re: to RG - Lisp lunacy and Perl psychosis <rNOSPAMon@flownet.com>
Re: to RG - Lisp lunacy and Perl psychosis <cartercc@gmail.com>
Re: to RG - Lisp lunacy and Perl psychosis <tadmc@seesig.invalid>
Re: to RG - Lisp lunacy and Perl psychosis <ben@morrow.me.uk>
Re: to RG - Lisp lunacy and Perl psychosis <rNOSPAMon@flownet.com>
Digest Administrivia (Last modified: 6 Apr 01) (Perl-Users-Digest Admin)
----------------------------------------------------------------------
Date: Wed, 10 Mar 2010 13:22:13 -0800
From: Jürgen Exner <jurgenex@hotmail.com>
Subject: Re: to RG - Lisp lunacy and Perl psychosis
Message-Id: <qu2gp5hbrtdq6s74sq2r7972cck8neo272@4ax.com>
John Bokma <john@castleamber.com> wrote:
>Jürgen Exner <jurgenex@hotmail.com> writes:
>
>> ccc31807 <cartercc@gmail.com> wrote:
>>>On Mar 10, 1:48 pm, Jürgen Exner <jurge...@hotmail.com> wrote:
>>>> That code is abominable and obfuscated, but of course you can write
>>>> abominable and obfuscated code in any programming language.
>> [...]
>>>$fac{$sec{$key}{'id1'}}{'location'}
>>
>> Thank you for confirming my point.
>>
>>>This isn't harder than C pointers.
>>
>> Saying something isn't harder than C pointers is like saying a desease
>> isn't worse than the Bubonic plague: it gives very little comfort to
>> people suffering from it.
>> Actually C pointers are probably among the worst concepts ever invented
>> in computer science.
>
>They are not "invented" they are somewhat a 1:1 mapping to
>assembly.
Exactly. You can hardly do worse than that ;-)
But in all fairness, when C was developed in the early 70s it was a
major step forward and Kerningham and Ritchie could not possibly have
known as much as we do today. For its time it was a great concept and
implementation. It's just that it is way outdated 40 years later.
> I've never had problems with C pointers but that's most likely
>also because I had programmed in Z80 assembly [1] (and some motorola
>processors) for a few years before programming in C.
Well, not much Z80 but quite a bit 6502 here in this corner.
>I do agree, however, that it would've been nice if C had references like
>Perl, and (harder to get to) pointers as they are now.
Or even Pascal or Modula or Haskell or pick pretty much any more modern
language. However you cannot blame a 40 year old language for reflecting
the thinking of 40 years ago.
jue
------------------------------
Date: Wed, 10 Mar 2010 15:53:04 -0600
From: Tad McClellan <tadmc@seesig.invalid>
Subject: Re: to RG - Lisp lunacy and Perl psychosis
Message-Id: <slrnhpg4un.ald.tadmc@tadbox.sbcglobal.net>
["Followup-To:" header set to comp.lang.perl.misc.]
Ron Garret <rNOSPAMon@flownet.com> wrote:
> In article <a4ofp5p0026pmis1a5cc4t8dg9cst9ugfv@4ax.com>,
> J?rgen Exner <jurgenex@hotmail.com> wrote:
>
>> Ron Garret <rNOSPAMon@flownet.com> wrote:
>> >Maybe I don't qualify as a journeyman I can't follow that Perl code, and
>> >for exactly the same reason that I can't follow Brainf*ck code: too much
>> >punctuation. What does !~ mean?
>>
>> perldoc perlop:
>> Binary "!=" returns true if the left argument is numerically not equal
>> to the right argument.
>
> What does that have to do with what I asked?
Nothing, but it does go a long way in supporting your point
about punctuation being hard to read correctly. :-)
--
Tad McClellan
email: perl -le "print scalar reverse qq/moc.liamg\100cm.j.dat/"
The above message is a Usenet post.
I don't recall having given anyone permission to use it on a Web site.
------------------------------
Date: Wed, 10 Mar 2010 13:57:30 -0800
From: Jürgen Exner <jurgenex@hotmail.com>
Subject: Re: to RG - Lisp lunacy and Perl psychosis
Message-Id: <ho3gp5tm4tspivfq1vj3idcdancc2c1r23@4ax.com>
Ron Garret <rNOSPAMon@flownet.com> wrote:
>In article <a4ofp5p0026pmis1a5cc4t8dg9cst9ugfv@4ax.com>,
> J?rgen Exner <jurgenex@hotmail.com> wrote:
>
>> Ron Garret <rNOSPAMon@flownet.com> wrote:
>> >Maybe I don't qualify as a journeyman I can't follow that Perl code, and
>> >for exactly the same reason that I can't follow Brainf*ck code: too much
>> >punctuation. What does !~ mean?
>>
>> perldoc perlop:
>> Binary "!=" returns true if the left argument is numerically not equal
>> to the right argument.
>
>What does that have to do with what I asked?
Sorry, my bad:
Binary "!~" is just like "=~" except the return value is negated in
the logical sense.
>> > What do the curly braces denote?
>>
>> Depends on where they are used. Some common uses include enclosure of
>> code block (perldoc perlsyn) and indexing of hashes (perldoc perldata).
>
>Yes, that is exactly the problem. Perl is not content with assigning
>semantics meaning to every single symbol on the keyboard, it *overloads*
>those symbols, so even if you *could* look them up you *still* wouldn't
>know what they meant without first deciphering the context.
You mean like lead and lead in English? Or + and + in C which, gasp, can
be used for char, short, byte, int, long, float, pointers, and a myriad
of others?
>> > What is /\d/?
>>
>> perldoc perlre:
>
>And how is one supposed to know that "perlre" is the right thing to look
>up here?
Because you were looking at a function who's first argument is a regular
expression and therefore checking out the documentation about regular
expressions as mentioned at the root level of the documentation in
"perldoc perl" seems like a good idea?
>BTW, these are all rhetorical questions.
>
>
>> It's all there. Granted, in particular perlop is hopelessly overloaded
>> and therefore information is hard to find, but you are very welcome to
>> improve it.
>
>And why on earth would I want to do that? No, seriously, what's the
>payoff? That is not a rhetorical question. What will I be able to do
>if I invest effort into learning and/or improving Perl that I cannot do
>just as easily and just as well in, say, Python?
True, for you it would be a major drawback because you couldn't rant
about it any longer.
[...]
>> >Except that it doesn't. It distinguishes between scalars,
>> >lists, and hash tables, but not between integers, floats, and strings.
>>
>> Why would you want to distinguish between them on such a low level?
>
>Why would I want to distinguish between types at all?
So are you suggesting that e.g. C's distinction between short, byte,
char, int, long, unsigned, double, ultra-special-extra-big .... would be
even better?
Typing is an aid to the programmer to avoid errors by inadvertently
using incompatible data types. However if the programming language
automatically converts between different data types according to context
and I can use them safely without ever thinking about a conversion, then
that is as big a step forward as not having to manually deal with memory
allocation and garbage collection of dynamic data structures.
>> >It distinguishes between strings and regular expressions,
>>
>> Well, those are very different animals. Strings are data while REs are
>> code.
>
>Potato, potahto. Strings are code when you feed them to EVAL.
I think I did mention eval(). And yes I also mentioned that eval() (as
well as RE when used with /e which is just an eval in disguise) breaks
the paradigm. But still this is only one very specific place which you
normally would not use in every-day code. Actually people are strongly
advised not to use eval for strings unless they know exactly why they
need to do it.
>> >It has all kinds of weird punctuationy things
>> >that you can't look up, like $@ and !~ and <>.
>>
>> Yes, you can. See perldoc perlvar, perldoc perlop, perldoc perlop.
>
>Let me be more precise: that you can't look up unless you know the
>secret incantation.
Where's the problem? Any item with a $ up front is a variable, so you
will probably find it in perldoc perlvar. The other two take arguments
and do some computation. So chances are good you will find them either
as functions (perldoc -f .....; no luck there) or in perldoc perlop as
suggested by the root of the perldoc tree.
>> >It fails silently where
>> >it should produce errors. It violates universally accepted conventions
>> >about what, for example, double quotes mean. For example, this:
>> >
>> >print "The widget costs $12.75.";
>> >The actual behavior of that code snippet is not justifiable under any
>> >sane language semantics.
>>
>> If you don't want variables ($12) to be interpolated, then don't use
>> quotes that interpolate variables:
>>
>> print 'The widget costs $12.75.'
>
>Yes, I know that. But what kind of brain damaged language allows
>numbers to be the names of variables in the first place? (That's
>another rhetorical question BTW.)
A language that wants something better than \12 as a variable name for
captured content from the 12th RE group?
jue
------------------------------
Date: Wed, 10 Mar 2010 14:13:32 -0800 (PST)
From: ccc31807 <cartercc@gmail.com>
Subject: Re: to RG - Lisp lunacy and Perl psychosis
Message-Id: <0a7976ea-11f8-4fe2-92de-5ded1b9b6511@u9g2000yqb.googlegroups.com>
On Mar 10, 12:45=A0pm, Ron Garret <rNOSPA...@flownet.com> wrote:
> Most of what I have to say about this has already been said by other
> people, but since this post is addressed specifically to me I'll respond
> nonetheless.
Thank you. This is the thoughtful, mature response that I hoped for,
rather than the rant that I feared.
> > I think any
> > journeyman programmer can follow the logic even if he doesn't
> > understand Perl or the data structures
>
> Maybe I don't qualify as a journeyman I can't follow that Perl code, and
You don't give yourself enough credit:
if (CONDITION 1) assign A to VAR
else if (CONDITION 2) assign B to VAR
else assign C to VAR
> What
> is /\d/?
from perlre:
\d Match a digit character
> that you can't look up, like $@ and !~ and <>.
from perlvar:
$@ The Perl syntax error message from the last eval() operator.
from perlop:
The null filehandle <> is special: it can be used to emulate the
behavior of sed and awk. Input from <> comes either from standard
input, or from each file listed on the command line.
Binary ``!~'' is just like ``=3D~'' except the return value is negated
in the logical sense.
> print "The widget costs $12.75.";
Variable interpolation allows you to avoid stuff like this:
print "The widget costs $" + var ".";
If you don't want variable interpolation, use single quotes:
'The widget costs $12.75.'
If you want to use double quotes, escape $:
"The widget costs \$12.75."
> The actual behavior of that code snippet is not justifiable under any san=
e language semantics.
Please see my justification above.
> =A0If you really want to
> continue this discussion
I really don't want to continue this discussion. I've said all I
intended to say, which was to respond to your remark that I quoted in
the original post. I respect your right to have an opinion, but I
don't respect your screed because it seemed to me to be based on
prejudice and ignorance.
My job entails querying databases and munging the data, and Perl is
well suited for this task -- after a bit of experience you can write
an assignment statement like:
$fac{$sec{$k}{'id1'}}{'location'} =3D
$sec{$sec{$k}{'xlist'}}{'site'};
without pausing to work out the fact that you are assigning the value
of a key to an anonymous hash held as a reference by the second hash
key to a key of an anonymous hash held as a reference by a key to the
first hash. Perl is a fat, ugly, old bitch but she makes some jobs
easy. You can justifiably criticize her appearance, and you can say
that you were unable to live with her, but you can't say that she IS
'horrible' and 'abominable' based on her appearance or the fact that
you can't live with her. She actually has a very sweet disposition
once you get to know her.
Ron, this isn't meant to insult you, or the Lisp community, or the
Perl community for that matter. Thanks for your response.
CC.
------------------------------
Date: Wed, 10 Mar 2010 14:56:42 -0800
From: Ron Garret <rNOSPAMon@flownet.com>
Subject: Re: to RG - Lisp lunacy and Perl psychosis
Message-Id: <rNOSPAMon-D9AB1B.14564210032010@news.albasani.net>
In article
<0a7976ea-11f8-4fe2-92de-5ded1b9b6511@u9g2000yqb.googlegroups.com>,
ccc31807 <cartercc@gmail.com> wrote:
> On Mar 10, 12:45Â pm, Ron Garret <rNOSPA...@flownet.com> wrote:
> > Most of what I have to say about this has already been said by other
> > people, but since this post is addressed specifically to me I'll respond
> > nonetheless.
>
> Thank you. This is the thoughtful, mature response that I hoped for,
> rather than the rant that I feared.
I'm not Erik even though I may occasionally agree with some of his
positions.
> Perl is a fat, ugly, old bitch but she makes some jobs
> easy. You can justifiably criticize her appearance, and you can say
> that you were unable to live with her, but you can't say that she IS
> 'horrible' and 'abominable' based on her appearance or the fact that
> you can't live with her. She actually has a very sweet disposition
> once you get to know her.
I don't know why you think "fat, ugly, old bitch" is more acceptable as
hyperbole than "horrible" and "abominable" but to me they are equivalent
sentiments. Perl's syntax is IMHO very badly designed. Python
dominates Perl in every conceivable way IMHO. I've had one firsthand
experience with Perl in production that turned out very badly. If
you're productive in Perl, more power to you. But you won't be working
for me.
> Ron, this isn't meant to insult you, or the Lisp community, or the
> Perl community for that matter. Thanks for your response.
You bet.
rg
------------------------------
Date: Wed, 10 Mar 2010 15:17:36 -0800 (PST)
From: ccc31807 <cartercc@gmail.com>
Subject: Re: to RG - Lisp lunacy and Perl psychosis
Message-Id: <ce68ccd0-22e2-472d-9cc3-06a2cf00a29f@y11g2000yqh.googlegroups.com>
On Mar 10, 5:56=A0pm, Ron Garret <rNOSPA...@flownet.com> wrote:
> =A0Python
> dominates Perl in every conceivable way IMHO.
I did a project in Python, once, and it turned out well. Python is a
sweet language, and I understand that they are now teaching it as the
first language at both MIT and GaTech.
>=A0I've had one firsthand
> experience with Perl in production that turned out very badly.
Was that because Perl was a bad match for the project? Or because the
developers were incompetent in Perl? I've done several major database
projects in Perl, and a great number of minor projects in Perl, and my
experience is that the match of a technology to a task sometimes is a
management decision, and managers sometimes make bad decisions.
>=A0If
> you're productive in Perl, more power to you. =A0But you won't be working
> for me.
I won't be working for you anyway. I've reached my level of
incompetence, and I intend to stay there! ;-)
CC
------------------------------
Date: 11 Mar 2010 00:19:16 GMT
From: Tamas K Papp <tkpapp@gmail.com>
Subject: Re: to RG - Lisp lunacy and Perl psychosis
Message-Id: <7vqr83F8e2U1@mid.individual.net>
On Wed, 10 Mar 2010 10:02:01 -0800, ccc31807 wrote:
> On Mar 10, 11:03Â am, Tamas K Papp <tkp...@gmail.com> wrote:
>> > Not my intent to start a flame war. Please reread my post.
>>
>> Yeah, sure. Â Cross-posting something like this usually promotes peace
>> and happiness.
>
> You still haven't read my post, or if you did you haven't comprehended
> it. There's nothing in it that works against peace and happiness. I
I have read your post and understood it, but I am not really
interested in getting into meta-discussions.
>> >> Here's the point: to call one language horrible and an abomination
>> >> because you don't understand it, and ignoring the horribleness and
>> >> the abominable in another language because you do understand it,
>> >> doesn't make any sense.
>>
>> You failed to show anything horrible or abominable in CL.
>
> That's right. There isn't anything horrible or abominable in either of
> the two languages. It certainly wasn't my intention to create that
> impression, just to opposite in fact.
So when you said "ignoring the horribleness and the abominable in
another language because you do understand it", what another language
were you referring to? Perl, CL, or something else?
> Somehow, you think that I've said exactly the opposite of what I meant.
> Either I wasn't clear in my writing, or you weren't clear in your
> reading. I'll try one more time.
>
> <emphasis>Calling a language horrible because you don't understand it is
> a mindless prejudice.</emphasis>
> A
> Do you understand that? I contrasted a bit of working Perl code (which
> appears to be abominable) to a deliberately obfuscated bit of Lisp code
> to make that point. I really don't understand why you think I have
> insulted CL, when I undertook to say that insult based on ignorance is
> pointless.
When you made a statement about "ignoring the horribleness and the
abominable in another language", I thought you meant Common Lisp. Did
you mean Perl?
Tamas
------------------------------
Date: Wed, 10 Mar 2010 16:41:27 -0800
From: Ron Garret <rNOSPAMon@flownet.com>
Subject: Re: to RG - Lisp lunacy and Perl psychosis
Message-Id: <rNOSPAMon-737CFB.16412710032010@news.albasani.net>
In article
<ce68ccd0-22e2-472d-9cc3-06a2cf00a29f@y11g2000yqh.googlegroups.com>,
ccc31807 <cartercc@gmail.com> wrote:
> >Â I've had one firsthand
> > experience with Perl in production that turned out very badly.
>
> Was that because Perl was a bad match for the project? Or because the
> developers were incompetent in Perl?
Why must those be the only possibilities? It was because the Perl code,
which had been working fine for months, suddenly started failing
silently and intermittently, and I was told there was no way to do the
equivalent of wrapping the whole script in the equivalent of a
TRY...EXCEPT form in order to catch the error. Whether this was in fact
true or whether the entire engineering team was incompetent I do not
know. But they seemed pretty bright and capable otherwise, so it would
be pretty odd for them all to be mistaken about this.
rg
------------------------------
Date: Wed, 10 Mar 2010 18:27:23 -0800
From: Ron Garret <rNOSPAMon@flownet.com>
Subject: Re: to RG - Lisp lunacy and Perl psychosis
Message-Id: <rNOSPAMon-55E1BB.18272310032010@news.albasani.net>
In article <slrnhpg4un.ald.tadmc@tadbox.sbcglobal.net>,
Tad McClellan <tadmc@seesig.invalid> wrote:
> ["Followup-To:" header set to comp.lang.perl.misc.]
>
> Ron Garret <rNOSPAMon@flownet.com> wrote:
> > In article <a4ofp5p0026pmis1a5cc4t8dg9cst9ugfv@4ax.com>,
> > J?rgen Exner <jurgenex@hotmail.com> wrote:
> >
> >> Ron Garret <rNOSPAMon@flownet.com> wrote:
> >> >Maybe I don't qualify as a journeyman I can't follow that Perl code, and
> >> >for exactly the same reason that I can't follow Brainf*ck code: too much
> >> >punctuation. What does !~ mean?
> >>
> >> perldoc perlop:
> >> Binary "!=" returns true if the left argument is numerically not equal
> >> to the right argument.
> >
> > What does that have to do with what I asked?
>
>
> Nothing, but it does go a long way in supporting your point
> about punctuation being hard to read correctly. :-)
Exactly.
rg
------------------------------
Date: Wed, 10 Mar 2010 18:58:54 -0800
From: Ron Garret <rNOSPAMon@flownet.com>
Subject: Re: to RG - Lisp lunacy and Perl psychosis
Message-Id: <rNOSPAMon-0B6150.18585410032010@news.albasani.net>
In article <ho3gp5tm4tspivfq1vj3idcdancc2c1r23@4ax.com>,
J?rgen Exner <jurgenex@hotmail.com> wrote:
> >> > What do the curly braces denote?
> >>
> >> Depends on where they are used. Some common uses include enclosure of
> >> code block (perldoc perlsyn) and indexing of hashes (perldoc perldata).
> >
> >Yes, that is exactly the problem. Perl is not content with assigning
> >semantics meaning to every single symbol on the keyboard, it *overloads*
> >those symbols, so even if you *could* look them up you *still* wouldn't
> >know what they meant without first deciphering the context.
>
> You mean like lead and lead in English? Or + and + in C which, gasp, can
> be used for char, short, byte, int, long, float, pointers, and a myriad
> of others?
Yes. Exactly.
> >> > What is /\d/?
> >>
> >> perldoc perlre:
> >
> >And how is one supposed to know that "perlre" is the right thing to look
> >up here?
>
> Because you were looking at a function who's first argument is a regular
> expression
And how am I supposed to know that if I don't know Perl?
> >And why on earth would I want to do that? No, seriously, what's the
> >payoff? That is not a rhetorical question. What will I be able to do
> >if I invest effort into learning and/or improving Perl that I cannot do
> >just as easily and just as well in, say, Python?
>
> True, for you it would be a major drawback because you couldn't rant
> about it any longer.
Yeah. That would really suck. What would I do for fun?
> [...]
> >> >Except that it doesn't. It distinguishes between scalars,
> >> >lists, and hash tables, but not between integers, floats, and strings.
> >>
> >> Why would you want to distinguish between them on such a low level?
> >
> >Why would I want to distinguish between types at all?
>
> So are you suggesting that e.g. C's distinction between short, byte,
> char, int, long, unsigned, double, ultra-special-extra-big .... would be
> even better?
No. Of course not. Don't be ridiculous.
> Typing is an aid to the programmer to avoid errors by inadvertently
> using incompatible data types.
Typing *would* be an aid to the programmer if Perl actually prevented
you from using incompatible types. But it doesn't, e.g.:
print "a" + "b";
Defensible results include producing an error or outputting "ab". But
not outputting 0, which is what it actually does.
And while I'm at it:
%x=123;
print %x;
Shouldn't that be an error? It isn't. It prints 123. So does this:
@x=123;
print @x;
This is actually legal perl program:
print $(,$);
There are dozens and dozens of these obscure punctuational shortcuts:
$], $@, %!, $:, $^, %-, $^P, @F, @_, it goes on and on.
I'm sorry, but this makes my skin crawl.
rg
------------------------------
Date: Wed, 10 Mar 2010 19:09:16 -0800 (PST)
From: ccc31807 <cartercc@gmail.com>
Subject: Re: to RG - Lisp lunacy and Perl psychosis
Message-Id: <5a67c5c1-22a1-458e-8c5c-21b97d95bb4a@z11g2000yqz.googlegroups.com>
On Mar 10, 7:19=A0pm, Tamas K Papp <tkp...@gmail.com> wrote:
> > That's right. There isn't anything horrible or abominable in either of
> > the two languages. It certainly wasn't my intention to create that
> > impression, just to opposite in fact.
>
> So when you said "ignoring the horribleness and the abominable in
> another language because you do understand it", what another language
> were you referring to? =A0Perl, CL, or something else?
I used the same words that RG used, which were, and I quote: "Perl is
just an ... abomination through-and-through. ... It was just
horrible." I wasn't referring to any particular language, but to the
descriptive lwords used. You might make a credible case that a
particular language is horrible, and support your argument with logic
and specific examples, but RG did not seem to do so. Instead, he
seemed to be making his argument from simple prejudice and ignorance.
I was pretty specific in stating that you can't judge a language
without knowing something of the substance of the language, and quite
frankly, I'm at a loss to see how you missed the main point.
> When you made a statement about "ignoring the horribleness and the
> abominable in another language", I thought you meant Common Lisp. =A0Did
> you mean Perl?
I didn't mean ANY particular language -- I meant the process of
characterizing a language the way RG did based on reading a few
chapters of an anonymous book. In the same way, I took it as fact that
someone who expresses prejudice AGAINST something would also express
prejudice TOWARD something else based on familiarity.
Over the years, I've had some interaction with students and graduates
of business and management departments of colleges and universities.
These departments have IS or MIS majors and programs, and they
typically use Microsoft technologies, such as Windows and Visual
Basic. As a result of their indoctrination, they sometimes believe
that Visual Basic is the highest and best programming language, and
that all other languages are inferior. I have had one experience (not
personal, but vicarious) of a manager taking over a unit of a large
financial services firm and decreeing that from thenceforth all new
development would use Windows, and MS tools, and that all existing
processes would be converted. This notwithstanding the fact that the
cost per transaction of the existing processes (Unix based) was about
twenty percent of the cost of the existing MS units and that the
conversion would entail substantial costs.
WRT Perl, I agree that it's an ugly, convoluted, write once read never
language, but it's popular, and it's popular for a reason. It's
popular despite the fact that it's not taught in school, or in
extension classes, or is on anyone's official list of approved
technologies. Personally, I can tell you that it's a very good match
for my job, better than any language I've had personal experience with
(and I've studied and or learned about a dozen languages in my
career.) I'm also making an effort to learn CL and achieve some
proficiency in CL. My feeling so far is that CL is a more powerful
language than Perl but not as suited to my job.
Here's the point: Don't disparage a language before you know it, and
don't rely on ignorant bias to disparage a language.
CC.
------------------------------
Date: Wed, 10 Mar 2010 21:31:25 -0600
From: Tad McClellan <tadmc@seesig.invalid>
Subject: Re: to RG - Lisp lunacy and Perl psychosis
Message-Id: <slrnhpgop4.bk8.tadmc@tadbox.sbcglobal.net>
["Followup-To:" header set to comp.lang.perl.misc.]
Ron Garret <rNOSPAMon@flownet.com> wrote:
> %x=123;
> print %x;
>
> Shouldn't that be an error?
And how are you supposed to know that if you don't know Perl?
(it does generate a warning, and all Real Perl Programmers enable warnings)
perl -we '%x=123; print %x;'
Would you think that printing 123 is reasonable if %x meant an array?
How do you know that it doesn't mean an array if you don't know Perl?
> It isn't. It prints 123. So does this:
>
> @x=123;
> print @x;
How do you know the percent-sign means anything different than at-sign?
Trying to understand a language (machine or human) that you do
not know is futile. You must either give up, or actually learn
the language.
--
Tad McClellan
email: perl -le "print scalar reverse qq/moc.liamg\100cm.j.dat/"
The above message is a Usenet post.
I don't recall having given anyone permission to use it on a Web site.
------------------------------
Date: Thu, 11 Mar 2010 04:47:34 +0000
From: Ben Morrow <ben@morrow.me.uk>
Subject: Re: to RG - Lisp lunacy and Perl psychosis
Message-Id: <689m67-nje1.ln1@osiris.mauzo.dyndns.org>
[F'ups set to clpmisc]
Quoth ccc31807 <cartercc@gmail.com>:
>
> WRT Perl, I agree that it's an ugly, convoluted, write once read never
> language,
No. No No No. *Your* Perl may be, but don't tarnish the rest of us with
the same brush. It's perfectly possible to write readable Perl; indeed,
IMHO, it's wasier to write readable Perl (with a little effort) than
most other languages.
> Here's the point: Don't disparage a language before you know it, and
> don't rely on ignorant bias to disparage a language.
The point you seem to be missing is that there *are* valid grounds for
calling Perl ugly. Ron Garret seems determined to miss them in favour of
complaining about too much punctuation, but they are there and they will
bite you hard if you stumble across one without knowing it's there. It
helps, in practice if not in theory, that the common convention of
function/Package/FILEHANDLE makes collision between those unlikely.
Ben
------------------------------
Date: Wed, 10 Mar 2010 21:04:04 -0800
From: Ron Garret <rNOSPAMon@flownet.com>
Subject: Re: to RG - Lisp lunacy and Perl psychosis
Message-Id: <rNOSPAMon-B09B75.21040410032010@news.albasani.net>
In article
<5a67c5c1-22a1-458e-8c5c-21b97d95bb4a@z11g2000yqz.googlegroups.com>,
ccc31807 <cartercc@gmail.com> wrote:
> WRT Perl, I agree that it's an ugly, convoluted, write once read never
> language, but it's popular, and it's popular for a reason.
Sarah Palin is popular too.
rg
------------------------------
Date: 6 Apr 2001 21:33:47 GMT (Last modified)
From: Perl-Users-Request@ruby.oce.orst.edu (Perl-Users-Digest Admin)
Subject: Digest Administrivia (Last modified: 6 Apr 01)
Message-Id: <null>
Administrivia:
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------------------------------
End of Perl-Users Digest V11 Issue 2866
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