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I sat here trying to think of some examples for a while, but I can't. I went and looked at some of the code I have on my systems... it isn't.

I sometimes think this is one of the failings of a lot of open source projects... without a good solid core group of people leading the charge you tend to end up with hack atop hack atop hack and various different coding styles and no coherent design. An example of that kind of code is SourceForge.

Now I can think of at least three examples of the opposite... unfortunately they're all proprietary code bases so I can't share them.

In many of the larger projects though you can ocasionally find bits and pieces of pure poetry in code. There's an example in the Linux kernel, I forget exactly where - maybe in the vmm, where someone took the time to fully digest a rather hairy function and they totally rewrote it without changing the inputs, output, or side-effects in a small clean block of code. These are the folks that turely deserve this shirt.

We need a new website, one that can showcase really good code... make it known as the art form it is. codepoet.com and codepoet.org are both already taken by indivuals... perhaps codepoetry.net? make it required reading by cs students, just like trips to art museums are required of art students, and theatre and literature majors are required to study the great works of their fields. Maybe they can sell T-shirts and posters with elegant code on them, and books full of gracefull algorythms.

For irony the site can also link to the obfuscated perl contest.

Read Teach Yourself CGI Programming with PERL 5 in a Week online.

are all here.

You can download all the entries from The Perl Journal Contest Page. It's not as convenient as copy&paste, but it works.

The issue is:

Are we telling people about software as speech (de-CSS in English, requires login), or about Open Source as FREE Software.

Recently I handled some people, people who barely knew about computers and internet, social sciences people, "The Cathedral and The Bazaar". The results were amazing. They caught the story completely and now we are discussing the issues with a new light.

My moral would be: tell teachers and parents about the new social values of Cooperative Development and sharing versus cheating, and the battle will be won, no matter if they use Windows. Tell teacher to start cooperative projects, OSS like, using the Internet as a collaborative tool. They will find it a great idea once they catch the concepts (and it's difficult for them to understand the issues). The boys will learn to use the mail to speak, no matter if they use Exchange or even Outlook for that.

That should be our target. When they know about Free Software and how it develops and evolves, they will compare it with propietary solutions, and they will have a clear mind to understand the differences.

Sorry for the evangelic tone, but I feeled truly evangelic ;)

Or Even better.... Perl Poetry.

Or Even better.... Perl Poetry.

Well, to an English speaker, it would probably look like line noise.

Rather like it does right now.

1st annual content
2nd annual contest
3rd annual contest
4th annual contest

Good luck to this year's contestants!

--
Kiro

There was a similar competition sometime back - the Prisoner's Dilemma Contest run by the Perl Journal. Your program played against two other programs in a series of matches, and the organizers would plant dumb robots.

The winning strategy there was actually a team of three entries: two of which (slaves) were bent on losing to the third (master). I read through the rock-paper-scissors contest rules, and I can see that such cooperation is not precluded. Try coding a master and a bunch of slaves, so that when they meet (and can recognize such a meeting), master will always beat slave. Of course, play sensibly when the master and slave are not playing against each other.

Come to think of it, Iocaine Powder + master-slave would be really powerful indeed.

Sreeram.
----------------------------------
Observation is the essence of art.

There was a similar competition sometime back - the Prisoner's Dilemma Contest run by the Perl Journal. Your program played against two other programs in a series of matches, and the organizers would plant dumb robots.

The winning strategy there was actually a team of three entries: two of which (slaves) were bent on losing to the third (master). I read through the rock-paper-scissors contest rules, and I can see that such cooperation is not precluded. Try coding a master and a bunch of slaves, so that when they meet (and can recognize such a meeting), master will always beat slave. Of course, play sensibly when the master and slave are not playing against each other.

Come to think of it, Iocaine Powder + master-slave would be really powerful indeed.

Sreeram.
----------------------------------
Observation is the essence of art.

There is a Perl module written by Damian Conway called Coy which performs error handling in haiku. It has an extensible grammer...

• The presentation on Coy from The Perl Conferenct (TPC) 1999
• It covered extensively in the Winter 99 Perl Journal.
• You can pick up a copy from your local CPAN.

-Yenya

--

Only without the years of development, the thousands of freely available modules, the extreme flexibility, the massive cross-platform portability (you can configure perl for your toaster), integration with Apache, Database support, tens of thousands of existing experts and freely available sample scripts, a huge set of some of the world's best programming language documentation, and (let's not forget) its own poetry (what other language can claim that?), having the core built by one of the coolest people on earth (read and laugh!).

Maybe Pike is amusing, but next to a language like Perl, is it really needed? And can you really claim that Pike has "character" when you can't even write poetry? (Yes, I am a Perl bigot.)

BTW, Hello world in perl? perl -e 'print "hello, world\n";' on the command line will do the trick. Ha!

David E. Weekly

Seriously, some of the patents and other such legal nonsense I've seen over the last few months make the Obfuscated Code contest look like preschool stuff. (not meant to degrade any of the amazing things those contestants do)

Finally, here are further links to, for example, the crypto law survey which will give you an idea of the legality of Crypto in various countries.

Good luck, and we will look forward to seeing your report if you choose to post it to the web.
--

> hey, our very own Harl is famous:
>
> http://www.itknowledge.com/tpj/perl -poetry00.html

Wow.

I doubt I'll be performing in Silicon Valey somehow. The program does sync the disk on a unix system though. I guess system calls are cheating a *bit*. However, I've replaced the sync command on one of my unix machines with this poem as a wrapper, so it runs the poem whenever a sync request is made.

Harl

• Obfuscated FoxPro
• Obfuscated Java Programming Contest
• The 1st Annual Obfuscated Perl Contest
• Obfuscated PostScript Contest

For those who haven't checked out 1.1.x Gimp, you really should It's a horse of a different bitmap. There's so much that's new. The Gimp/Perl plugins (my favorite, as a few are mine) have really come of age. The user-interface is still a little quirky, but gods is it nicer than 1.0.

The fast unsharp mask is amazing. Try sucking in a photo of some forest scene or people. Use Image -> Equalize and then use Filters -> Enhance -> Unsharp Mask. You will see detail you couldn't see when you were taking the picture!

1.2 is going to really rock. Suck it out of CVS if you want to see the latest, and/or work on the code. There's a great CVS tutorial for accessing the Gimp here:

CVS Tutorial.

Also you can find Gimp News here.

Also, as a shameless plug, you could find out how to write plugins in Perl from my recent Perl Journal article. You can find out more about the Perl Journal at http://www.itknowledge.com/tpj/ It's kind of a funny article, since in it I plug my company, and I no longer work there ;-)

There is a link on the main page of The Perl Journal.

You can find a write-up of last year's contest in issue 10 of the Perl Journal.