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Zen is not about intelligence, it is the art of turning off intelligence.

Thus proving that the most successful Zen denomination so far is Christianity.

Sorry, couldn't resist. ...but seriously folks.

I, for one, remember sitting at my computer, so young that I wasn't really cognizant of the commands I was giving the computer. To 7-year-old-me on an Atari computer, I was speaking a magic spell, albeit with my fingers.

Is it any wonder that we're mystical as a group? We speak in arcane languages, and through our words and thoughts, actions are performed. Whether they be parlor tricks, or real power, we can still do something, merely by speaking, that 98% of humanity (or whatever) cannot, and honestly probably about 80% even if they devoted their lives to it. Why aren't we wizards, again?

The list of RFCs for Perl 6 is pretty long. The changes look like they address a lot of the problems people have had with Perl. But how compatible is Perl 6 going to be with Perl 5? Will most packages/scripts need to be rewritten? Will the C extensions of Perl 5 need to be rewritten? I didn't see anything in the Perl 6 materials on the site that answered these questions (but maybe Larry addressed it in his speech).

Yeah. Perl6 is supposed to be about 18 months away, when it will be available in early but stable alpha. Seeing, however, as some of the objectives for the "shame dates" haven't yet been made (overdue for a month, some of them), I'd suspect that the project will, as all of them tend to do, take a little longer than initially projected.

And as for radical changes: I'm expecting some, but nothing truly off-the-wall (RFC to toss out @% was retracted, etc.) You can see the ones that have been frozen so far as well as the ones that have been retracted here.
That said, I've seen some really cool stuff in the RFCs, regarding things like higher-order functions and co-routines. It's been my experience that Perl has always managed to take complicated computer-science concepts and make them into incredibly powerful yet easy-to-use features that even a newbie can understand, and I'm personally very excited to see a lot of RFC suggestions for more functional-oriented programming styles (and of course, as always, for improvement in the object-oriented side of Perl).

Of course, Rule 1 continues to apply. :-)

No, then it wouldn't be a quote from the story poster. It IS a good addendum warning about the status of the release. The story goes a little something like this:

Perl 5.7.0 Released (Devel Version) Posted by Hemos on 07:51 PM -- Sunday September 03 2000
from the makin'-time-with-the-camel dept.
qbasicprogrammer writes "The long awaited Perl 5.7.0 version has finally been released! Source code is available from CPAN. If you haven't upgraded yet, now is the time. In related news, development of Perl 6 is continuing swiftly as demonstrated by the Perl 6 Library." Check out the head's up story saying that it was coming - just a reminder this is *devel*. Don't play with it unless you know what you are doing.

Note, the stuff in italics is a quote from the story poster and the addendum on the bottom talking about it being *devel* is Hemos being a good journalist, actuarially quoting the story poster in it's entirety and informing the reader with a stern warning in the headline and the tagline.

If you want stuffy editors filtering your content, goto the nytimes. This is /. it ain't all right but it's allright.

No, then it wouldn't be a quote from the story poster. It IS a good addendum warning about the status of the release. The story goes a little something like this:

Perl 5.7.0 Released (Devel Version) Posted by Hemos on 07:51 PM -- Sunday September 03 2000
from the makin'-time-with-the-camel dept.
qbasicprogrammer writes "The long awaited Perl 5.7.0 version has finally been released! Source code is available from CPAN. If you haven't upgraded yet, now is the time. In related news, development of Perl 6 is continuing swiftly as demonstrated by the Perl 6 Library." Check out the head's up story saying that it was coming - just a reminder this is *devel*. Don't play with it unless you know what you are doing.

Note, the stuff in italics is a quote from the story poster and the addendum on the bottom talking about it being *devel* is Hemos being a good journalist, actuarially quoting the story poster in it's entirety and informing the reader with a stern warning in the headline and the tagline.

If you want stuffy editors filtering your content, goto the nytimes. This is /. it ain't all right but it's allright.

No, then it wouldn't be a quote from the story poster. It IS a good addendum warning about the status of the release. The story goes a little something like this:

Perl 5.7.0 Released (Devel Version) Posted by Hemos on 07:51 PM -- Sunday September 03 2000
from the makin'-time-with-the-camel dept.
qbasicprogrammer writes "The long awaited Perl 5.7.0 version has finally been released! Source code is available from CPAN. If you haven't upgraded yet, now is the time. In related news, development of Perl 6 is continuing swiftly as demonstrated by the Perl 6 Library." Check out the head's up story saying that it was coming - just a reminder this is *devel*. Don't play with it unless you know what you are doing.

Note, the stuff in italics is a quote from the story poster and the addendum on the bottom talking about it being *devel* is Hemos being a good journalist, actuarially quoting the story poster in it's entirety and informing the reader with a stern warning in the headline and the tagline.

If you want stuffy editors filtering your content, goto the nytimes. This is /. it ain't all right but it's allright.

Its pretty obvious that no one really knows yet what perl6 is going to be.

Some factions are gunning for radical changes, others (notably Tom Christiansen) seem to be holding a conservative stance.

One thig is certain - perl6 is not coming in any form anytime soon. Try 2002.

Secondly, Perl has been ported to Windows. Now, you can run all the nice perl scripts and programs on Windows. Check the Perl Power Tools for another set of free standard Unix utilities that you can run on Windows.

First, I really am curious if you actually are a programmer...

I'm an IT consultant, though I have done a fair bit of VB programming in the past. So yes, I suppose I am a programmer, if not a professional one.

Secondly, as to use of whitespace, I suppose its rather non-American of me, but I happen to find a quiet elegance in code that is well spaced, and where whitespace is used to create clear, clean segments of code.

And yet you say that you don't like languages like Python where such neatness is part of the language?

I have read code that made me laugh, code that made me think, and occaisionally, code that made me cry.

Well, I've read code that made me laugh and cry, but that wasn't anything to do with aesthetics, more to do with the quality...

---
Jon E. Erikson

Sarathy is still involved (as mentioned on use Perl). I personally expect Tom to be involved with Perl, and would be surprised if he left. I have a sneaking suspicion that Ilya might be involved with it, too. He was at the meeting on Tuesday and seemed intrigued.

The above is also found in it's original form at use.perl.org. use.perl.org is a great site, and also based on Slash (the slashdot.org engine).

Get your daily Perl news shot at Nandor's site http://use.perl.org

In a shock development, noted Karma whore Signal "Siggy" 11 has become a troll! Perhaps demoralised by the constant pressure of the fatwa or "trollslap" launched by his enemies, he released a post full of trollworthy statements. In one post, he combined:

• The incorrect technical statement: Witness the "NSA key" in Windows 95/98/NT/W2K
• The moronic political view: Someday, someone is going to need to devise a technical solution to these political problems
• The ludicrous hyperbole: This is why they are so afraid of geeks - they know we have it within our power to end this form of tyranny for good. We are in control of the ultimate modern day press.
• Another maddeningly silly technical statement: until we rearchitecture the network to utterly defeat measures like this (transparent crypto?)

"It's gonna be a challenge. Siggy obviously has huge name recognition, and one has to think that he's using his brand unfairly to push into new markets. But I'm not excessively worried. His tech-ignorance is something that we've been doing for a long time, and his sub-Katz geek politics are really to Karma-whorish to show that he "gets it" with respect to trolling. He's got quite a nice line in spurious logic, but he's no Dumb Marketing Guy. Bring it on, motherfuckers"

This page describes, in Unix manual page style, a Perl program available for downloading from this site which corrects numerous errors and incompatibilities in HTML generated by, or edited with, Microsoft applications. The demoroniser keeps you from looking dumber than a bag of dirt when your Web page is viewed by a user on a non-Microsoft platform. NAME demoroniser - correct moronic and gratuitously incompatible HTML generated by Microsoft applications SYNOPSIS demoroniser [ -u ] [ -w cols ] [ infile ] [ outfile ] DESCRIPTION Many slick, high profile corporate Web sites I visit seemed to exhibit terrible grammar completely inconsistent with the obvious investment in graphics and design. Apostrophes and quote marks were frequently omitted, and every couple of paragraphs words were run together which should have been separated by a punctuation mark of some kind.

This remained a mystery to me until I wanted to convert a presentation I'd developed in 1996 using Microsoft PowerPoint into a set of Web pages. A friend was kind enough to run the presentation through PowerPoint's "Save as HTML" feature (I have abandoned all use of Microsoft products, so I did not have a current version of PowerPoint which includes this feature). When I got the PowerPoint-generated HTML back and viewed it in my browser, I discovered that it contained precisely the same grammatical errors I'd noted on so many Web sites, and which certainly were not present in my original presentation.

A little detective work revealed that, as is usually the case when you encounter something shoddy in the vicinity of a computer, Microsoft incompetence and gratuitous incompatibility were to blame. Western language HTML documents are written in the ISO 8859-1 Latin-1 character set, with a specified set of escapes for special characters. Blithely ignoring this prescription, as usual, Microsoft use their own "extension" to Latin-1, in which a variety of characters which do not appear in Latin-1 are inserted in the range 0x82 through 0x95--this having the merit of being incompatible with both Latin-1 and Unicode, which reserve this region for additional control characters.

These characters include open and close single and double quotes, em and en dashes, an ellipsis and a variety of other things you've been dying for, such as a capital Y umlaut and a florin symbol. Well, okay, you say, if Microsoft want to have their own little incompatible character set, why not? Because it doesn't stop there--in their inimitable fashion (who would want to?)--they aggressively pollute the Web pages of unknowing and innocent victims worldwide with these characters, with the result that the owners of these pages look like semi-literate morons when their pages are viewed on non-Microsoft platforms (or on Microsoft platforms, for that matter, if the user has selected as the browser's font one of the many TrueType fonts which do not include the incompatible Microsoft characters).

You see, "state of the art" Microsoft Office applications sport a nifty feature called "smart quotes." (Rule of thumb--every time Microsoft use the word "smart," be on the lookout for something dumb). This feature is on by default in both Word and PowerPoint, and can be disabled only by finding the little box buried among the dozens of bewildering option panels these products contain. If enabled, and you type the string,

"Halt," he cried, "this is the police!"

"smart quotes" transforms the ASCII quote characters automatically into the incompatible Microsoft opening and closing quotes. ASCII single and double quotes are similarly transformed (even though ASCII already contains apostrophe and single open quote characters), and double hyphens are replaced by the incompatible em dash symbol. What other horrors occur, I know not. If the user notices this happening at all, their reaction might be "Thank you Billy-boy--that looks ever so much nicer," not knowing they've been set up to look like a moron to folks all over the world.

You see, when you export a document as text for hand-editing into HTML, or avail yourself of the "Save as HTML" features in newer versions of Office applications, these incompatible, Microsoft-specific characters remain in place. When viewed by a user on a non-Microsoft platform, they will not be displayed properly--most browsers seem to just drop them, as opposed to including a symbol indicating an undisplayable character. Hence, the apparently ungrammatical text, which the author of the page, editing on a Microsoft platform, will never be aware of.

Having no desire to hand-edit the HTML for a long presentation to correct a raft of Microsoft-induced incompatibilities, I wrote a Perl program, the demoroniser, to transform Microsoft's "junk HTML" into at least a starting point for something I'd consider presentable on my site. In addition to replacing the incompatible characters with HTML-compliant equivalents wherever possible (a few rarely-encountered characters which can't be translated result in warning messages if encountered), the following sloppy or downright wrong HTML is corrected.

• The missing semicolon at the end of numeric character escapes (=) is supplied.
• Numeric renderings of special characters (< > &) are replaced with readable equivalents.
• Unquoted <table> tags containing non-alphanumeric characters are quoted.
• PowerPoint's mis-nesting of <font> and <strong> tags is corrected.
• PowerPoint's boneheaded use of <ul> and </ul> tags to accomplish paragraph breaks is corrected and the proper <p> tags inserted.
• Missing <tr> tags in text-only slides are inserted.
• Nugatory </p> tags are removed.
• Unmatched <li> tags in headings are removed.
• Idiot "paragraph-long lines" are broken into something suitable for editing with a normal text editor.

-w cols Wrap output lines at column cols. By default, lines are wrapped at column 72. A cols specification of 0 disables line wrapping. demoroniser attempts to wrap lines so as to preserve their meaning. Lines are broken at white space whenever possible. If this cannot be done, a line longer than the cols specification will remain in the output HTML. BUGS demoroniser is a Perl script. In order to use it, you must have Perl installed on your system. demoroniser was developed using Perl 4.0, patch level 36. FILES If no outfile is specified, output is written to standard output. If no infile is specified, input is read from standard input. SEE ALSO perl(1) Download demoroniser.zip AUTHOR John Walker
http://www.fourmilab.ch/

This software is in the public domain. Permission to use, copy, modify, and distribute this software and its documentation for any purpose and without fee is hereby granted, without any conditions or restrictions. This software is provided "as is" without express or implied warranty.

by John Walker
January 16th, 1998

Anyone with a little perl knowledge can go a long way towards making a slashcode site into a customer support, file download, or of course a news and events website.

Anyways, here's the slashsites in case anyone is interested.

• Media-Mixer
• RadioTiki
• ipv6news.org
• PRIME Wrestling
• Knowledgerush
• High Performance Hunting
• marketseat.com
• ExtraCrispy.Net
• YourOfficeGeek
• ITCouncil
• Morrissey Solo
• The Cedar Valley Linux Users Group
• EastVan
• earthDot
• meepdot
• Love9
• MedMeta
• jazz-flute.com
• jazz-sax.com
• SigKill
• University of Utah College of Engineering Computing Facility
• Mr. Lego
• FuelCellTalk
• Portland Geekly News
• The Golden Horde Network
• use Perl;
• MacSlash
• bottomquark
• We Have No Product
• TQY3
• gildot
• Tar Heel State Online
• SlashHosting (Hosting for Slash sites)
• slashhost (Hosting for Slash sites)
• IDM Newsbase
• gosports.org
• Anime Station
• NetGAMES
• OnTopofIT
• Web Crush
• HairyPALM.com: The PDA InfoQuarters
• Myworkflow.com
• Techdirt.com
• Be Route (French)
• Yourtown CLN
• DNS Policy
• BarraPunto (Spanish)
• isrec.org
• AbsolutChaos
• Extreme XL Linux News
• Spam Roaster's Club

First, I'd like to say that DBI itself is very cool, and I find it really useful.

I read the book as soon as it came out several weeks ago; I was anticipating its release very much. I skimmed most of it, though, as it's kinda lightweight. The first 50 pages deal with flatfiles.. blah. Out of 330 pages, the last 140 of them are appendix -- which is the perldoc pages that you can get a more up-to-date version (and quicker access) of online.

Also, I think it's weird that they'd spend 50 pages on (non-DBI) flatfiles, then only like 125 (excluding appendix) on DBI.

• Interview with the authors
• DBI-users archive
• Old DBI-users archive, but w/index
• Positive review by perl.org (duh..)

This is incorrect. As reported on use Perl :-) you can use standard perl 5.6.0 if ActivePerl is unavailable for your platform. I guess that means that if you use Linux for x86, you need to use ActivePerl; but who is gonna know if you don't, and just use perl 5.6.0? They are the same thing.

Yeah, but use Perl had this story before Slashdot did!

most people that are Christians are not true Christians. They do not attend Church twice a week and pray every night

A 'true Christian' (your term, not mine) would go to Church more frequently than twice a week (how about twice a day?), and would pray more regularly than every night. A true Christian would praise God with everything he says and does.

A place where Christianity is taboo has a much larger proportion of programmers than almost any other website I know of.

Christianity is not a taboo on Slashdot, what rubbish. However, Slashdot is a Linux website and discussions of Christianity would be off-topic. In fact, Slashdot gives a free platform from which Christians (such as myself) are able to air our views. Try Advogato and The Stile Project for even less coverage of Christian issues. You will then realise how tolerant Slashdot is to the discussion of Christianity and Christian issues.

Fourth: a farmhand is likely to have grown up in Middle America, a place of strong moral fiber, and to be free from many of the evil influences that the city brings.

Utter nonsense, trollboy. Middle America is a place of very poor moral fibre - it is an inherently racist region and a region ruled by violence. Guns (the tools Satan uses to turn man against his fellow man) are widespread in America, and the majority of Americans worship the ideals of consumerism rather than God. It is down to individual choice whether or not to follow Evil, and in this respect no region is better than any other. As far as "evil influences" of cities, surely cities have more churches per area than small less densely populated villages, therefore cities are intrinsically holy?

Most people with a Computer Science degree are lucky to remain with the slightest few sheds of religion that have not been indoctrinated out of them.

Hello? Computer Science degrees make no attempts influence people's religious views. While they may indoctrinate people that Python is better than Perl, Solaris is better than BSD, vi is better than EMACS and Microsoft is better than everything put together, these are not religous arguments. They are trivial.

Please, think before you post next time.

Interesting points. But I feel that while PHP may be a good language, it has origins that I feel are somewhat suspect and disqualify it from any serious use in my web applications.

What, for example, is the name supposed to imply?

That this language is so far removed from reality that nothing will affect it?
That this language will give you feelings of strength, power, and invulnerability?
That this is a "supercharged" web scripting language that will stop at nothing to achieve whatever delusional whims you set out for it to accomplish?
That this language will put some real "rocket fuel" into your dotcom enterprise, even more so than, say, small investments from an angel? (Which would be "angel dust", no?)

Let me ask you, then - what kind of message does this send to our children? I have a twelve year old daughter who wants to be a webmaster, and she came home from school the other day and asked me about PHP. What am I supposed to tell her? That it's ok to use it professionally, but not recreationally? Only if you're putting up a website? Please -- we all know that that's the long slide towards addiction, a mad quest for the drug, and finally going broke and living under an overpass with a 40 oz. bottle of Old English, begging money from passing strangers and carrying on extensive conversations with crows, pigeons, and skinny, mangy rats.

Somebody needs to take a hard-line stance against this language and make sure that it spreads no further. Why can't people use sensible, wholesome languages such as Perl, Python, ASP, and TCL?

Next time, before you go and create a scripting language with dubious moral intent: think about the children. Please.

It happened when I chose www.perl.org too. I think it has more to do with using Active Server Pages without proper tweaking.

Oh well,
it was a neat idea, anyway.

-

How about real standards like CORBA, OpenGL and PHP or PERL. What comes to sound OpenAL is very promising.
_________________________

Ewan is heading up just such an open source project you mention. Check out www.ensembl.org.

In a more general way we are also working on tools over at bio.perl.org

BTW, I've never seen so many idiotic, lame trolls and comments on Slashdot before. What's up with Perl, do people hate it that much or does it just attract lusers?

Hey everyone, there is talk of Perl certification and a mailing list is starting up (link here). What's everyone think? By the way, IMHO I have never seen so many lame, idiotic trolls and comments ever on Slashdot. What's up, do people hate Perl that much or do Perl topics just attract lusers?

IMO, I don't think we need BASIC, because we already have languages that are much better. However, development tools ( such as GUI buiders and IDEs ) to go on top of those languages would be cool.
Cheers,

I'd trust what Mark-Jason Dominus said or what Tom Christiansen said about the Perl for Dummies book.

I haven't looked at it yet, but I've heard good things about Elements of Programming with Perl. I've also been told that MacPerl: Power and Ease does a good job of teaching perl programming as well as teaching the MacOS specific areas of MacPerl.

I don't think it is possible to overestimate the importance of the issue of data formats, at least not in the context of looking at word processors. If you want your document to be usable five years from now, it is ludicrously unacceptable to use whatever "document embedding" scheme MSFT uses this year.

The format has several notable effects:

• If it is "text-based," this may mean that you can email documents without worrying about special encodings.

  Note that the spreadsheet XESS promotes this as a "selling feature."

  (Others may say, uuencode is your friend. )

• If it is text-based, this means that you may be able to modify the document using other tools than the word processor.

  That's useful for debugging, solving problems, modifying the document when you move it over to a laptop that doesn't have the word processor installed and have to use vi.

• If the format is based on some normative standard, this means that you can expect to be able to create documents using external tools.

  For instance, if the program uses an XML-based format, it becomes reasonable to write a Perl, Python, or Scheme.

  Example-of-the-week: I've been working on generating spreadsheet files for use with Gnumeric. The plan is to write Scheme scripts that pull data out of GnuCash, and generate reports. I haven't gotten to the "extraction" part, but have generated some pretty slick demo spreadsheets.

  Someone in a law (or para-law) office might want to create a document template scheme where they run a K001 GUIed program that asks for names and sundry fields, and then generates legal documents. Given a sufficiently "open" format, that's pretty practical.

Using formats where there's at least some visible ASCII text seems to me to be the only reasonable way to go. I'll remain a bit skeptical of XML; just 'cause it's buzzword-compliant doesn't mean that the DTD will be in use in the long term...

See bio.perl.org. Article there titled "How Perl Saved The Human Genome Project."

I'm assuming (having not seen the problem in question), that like a number of site I've seen today, people have really not been paying attention when they've been writing their perl code.

Specifically, and as Tom Christiansen states in his Y2k essay, the value for the year returned by the time functions is _NOT_ a two digit year... it merely _USED_ to be the case.... If you try to calcluate the year by "19".$year, you're going to be in trouble, but 1900+$year is entirely fine.

In keeping with the whole Y2k issue in general... fixing the base behaviour of the system (if necessary) is easy... fixing the behaviour of the cluefully-challenged coder, or (worse still) the end user, is a far tougher job.

Personally... as somebody who's just survived the whole roll-ever thing with nothing worse than a feeling that he shouldn't have hit the scotch _QUITE_ so hard, and a crashed MS Exchange server that he'll fix tomorrow, I'd just like to say that I feel pretty damned good about the whole damned thing. Now... if only I'd have been on paid overtime for posting comments at >5am the following day ;)


-- Jules

We are a small Internet development shop, running a few servers and a mixed bag of development stations. Currently, there are three Linux boxen on our network, running the latest RedHat releases. We are looking to put in three more systems, for a total of 5 running some Linux/UNIX like OS.

• A MySQL server box
• A Firewall
• A Mail/Fileserver
• 2 Webservers running Apache / PHP(Zend)

When we perform this upgrade, we are willing to change operating systems if there is a demonstrable benefit. Due to recent slashdot postings we have started looking at OpenBSD as our server OS. Now, we do understand that RedHat is not the only Linux distribution available, but we don't really want to get into a Linux/Linux war here. We don;t mind changing if we should for technical reasons - but the Linux world seems more hip and vibrant, and we really like the penguin T-shirts we have... so if we can stay on Linux then we want to.

So far, we like what we hear about OpenBSD - but we don't know if the things we like are inherent in the relative designs of OpenBSD or if they are results of policy choices by the OpenBSD team. If they are the results of policy decisions, then with any luck a Linux distribution could be found that exhibited the same characteristics?

Features we like about OpenBSD:

• It seems like the release/testing cycle is extremely carefully controlled. While a freewheeling machine with lots of OpenSource code on the desktop is a good thing, for a server it seems that a smaller group exercising testing/release control is a more controlled system.
• The integrated crypto looks great, the one time use passwords look like a big winner here.
• There are a lot of references to OpenBSD's security and stability - but none with any specific examples or technical backing.
• The file layout on OpenBSD seems like a winner, it looks like things live in a well thought out and logical set up - not in a mishmash like RedHat.

Assumptions:

These systems will be running the server software they need, and X11 + (Gnome||KDE) for administration and so on. They will not be running the latest stuff from Linuxberg or a bunch of things that would be on a desktop OS. So we are going to try very hard not to introduce any instabilities. We aren't going to be compiling running games, sound drivers and the like that integrate directly into the kernel.

The questions are:

1. Is OpenBSD more secure in some fundamental way that a well maintained Linux distribution?
2. Is OpenBSD more stable than a well maintained Linux distribution?
3. Will the OpenSource software we normally need (firewall, Apache, PHP4, Perl, Python) and so on probably compile on OpenBSD?
4. Does OpenBSD have something like clustering support (Beowulf) and failover?
5. Is the performance of a well maintained OpenBSD system better than a well maintained Linux distribution?
6. Does Linux have anything like the one time use password system?
7. Does OpenBSD support multiple CPU's better then Linux?

Thanks for taking the time, and hopefully we can keep the flames down to nothing and talk about technical issues this time.

• ensembl is an open source genome project designed to get as much data and software into the public domain as possible
• EMBOSS
• bioperl

Anyway - check out these projects for more information about real open source efforts in biology.

much (most?) of the software that the Debian team puts in the DebianBSD distribution would still be GPL, which means FastBuck Inc. would not be able to take DebianBSD as-is and apply a closed-source license.

This is better than the opposite observation that I was going to point out, which is that there are components of Debian, such as Perl, Python, and XFree86 that already use non-GPL-like licenses.

This is doubtless not proof against the serious cryptographers of the NSA, but it would be most entertaining to have a PalmPilot utility for it...

Bioperl at bio.perl.org

Ewan Birney, bio.perl.org hacker extrordinaire is heading up a new effort called ensEMBL which is intended to provide a free and open "baseline" annotation of the human genome. You can find more info at http://ensembl.ebi.ac.uk.

While Perl is far better for parsing and regular expressions PHP3 is much nicer and closer to C than perl also it is a server side languague which makes it noticably faster and the database intergration is great compare it to the database intergration of Cold Fusion.

But I am not the only one that thinks that this is a great languague the estimated amount of servers using PHP should hit 1,000,000 this November which is a dramatic increase from the less than 80,000 when I started using it June 1998.

Conclusion: Don't stop using Perl but use PHP3 as well you will find them both usefull for different situations, if you visit dtheatre.com a good 20%+ of the first page is Perl generated and the rest is PHP3.
-------------------------------------------

Unfortunately, you lose some abilities:

• The ability to change a script "on the fly" whilst debugging, and have the change automagically deployed. With C++, you have to make and then go through whatever installation process is required to deploy the change.
• Scripting languages like Perl and Python provide built-in operators for doing all sorts of text manipulations.

  With web applications, what you're largely manipulating is text, which means that having the language oriented to that is extremely valuable. Furthermore, since there are powerful, well-optimized operators built-in to these languages, the interpreter disadvantage is significantly diminished.

If you're interested in Perl Advocacy, you might want to join the Perl Advocacy mail list. Send the message "subscribe advocacy" to majordomo@perl.org.

David

Right now the field is pretty hot -- companies and labs are desperate for biologists who can code and techies who have a basic mol. bio background.

We even have our own Open Source projects to play around with :) Take a look at http://bio.perl.org.

Need to re-read/A> it?

:-)

Cheers,
Ben

This guy is the patch pumpkin? Does that mean he gets passed around from developer to developer? Don't they mean, he's the patch pumpking ?

Also, the guy worries me. He works for ActiveState. Blech. Nothing concrete, I'm not on the perl mailing lists, so I'm probably wrong, but that seems a bit .. scary.

Here are a few more links for more information about HTTP and some neat things that are being done with it...

• Get the latest dirt from the World Wide Web Consortium.
• RFC 2616: Hypertext Transfer Protocol -- HTTP/1.1 ( text, PostScript, PDF)
• Berkeley's TranSend service is a cluster of workstations working together to act as a massive HTTP proxy. This proxy "transforms" Web pages based on clients settings. Was the basis of the ( now-commercial) Top Gun Wingman Web browser for the PalmPilot.
• The Anonymizer acts as a proxy that strips out all the unwanted/unneeded header lines that your Web browser sends.

I had started hacking together an HTTP/1.1-compliant proxy in perl that did on-the-fly compression if the client supported it, but I never got around to completing it. Initial results were impressive, especially when it was paired with a caching proxy like Squid or a CacheFlow box. Of course, with DSL and cable modems getting more widespread use, people like myself that are still pinned to a 33.6k connection are being left behind.

Caching/compressing/proxying is still in widespread usage outside North America (most notably Australia and European countries). Their problem was (is!) outrageous access prices and relatively slow overseas connections, so they've been using caching for a long time to help solve it. The US and Canada have solved their "problem" of Web pages not instantaneously loading by throwing more bandwidth at it...

This was first made public on the Perl News (specifically, http://www.perl.org/cgi-bin/tpi-news?type=text&tex t=Votes+to+Dissolve), which is on perl.org but is not run by The Perl Institute directly (I run it :).

Anyway, Perl News will continue to have the latest and greatest about the goings on with TPI and Perl Mongers and perl.org and cpan.org and the professor and Mary Ann.

This was first made public on the Perl News (specifically, http://www.perl.org/cgi-bin/tpi-news?type=text&tex t=Votes+to+Dissolve), which is on perl.org but is not run by The Perl Institute directly (I run it :).

Anyway, Perl News will continue to have the latest and greatest about the goings on with TPI and Perl Mongers and perl.org and cpan.org and the professor and Mary Ann.

No, because it is the only license that perpetuates the FSF concept of freedom at the expense of a concept of freedom held by many other people.

"Freedom" is too important a word to allow it to be exclusively defined by one person or organization.

Craig

Typo! Try this link :)

perl bindings

These are really good for simple apps. Sys admins will love this stuff!