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For Sale: 1 Damian Conway, 1 Dan Sugalski
Kurt writes "Yet Another Society, through its newly formed Perl Foundation, is launching yet another fund drive to help support the Perl community. This year we will be supporting Damian Conway and Dan Sugalski. Damian will continue to work on a variety of Perl 5 modules and the design of Perl 6. Dan will continue his work on the implementation of Perl 6. More details are available at the Perl Foundation web site. Contributions are tax deductible, so donate today!" Many people will remember when we did this last year. I think it's been a roaring success. So go donate!
Do they cook? Clean?
How much will feeding them / boarding them cost?
...we've already bought a Damian Conway. We're not interested in whatever cheap imitation you're trying to foist on us.
Liberty uber alles.
Yes, it is horribly complex.
Look at that hello world program for example:
print "Hello World!";
Now, that's some complex piece of software. Ok, let's say you want to have a list of strings. You could do so like that:
@list = ("element1", "element2", "element3")
Well, just try to do the same in C.
Contrary to popular belief, Perl is easy. The thing is that you don't need to know everything to use it. Just a small subset will satisfy you.
People think it is hard because of the syntax and variety of constructs you can use. Well, for sure Perl is very flexible. But in no way it is a defficiency of the language. Perl is of course better suited to some tasks, as is any programming language.
And to those who think that all Perl programs are incomprehensible pieces of rubbish, remember this: Only Bad Programmers Code Badly in Perl(tm).
cheers
I wonder if you could see them on Ebay? Maybe try selling of shares or something like that... probably againt their rules. I bet you'd get lots of visibility that way though.
A few questions:
Are they housetrained? If I buy both of them do I have to keep them in seperate cages or can I let them play together? Is there any sort of special diet I need to be aware of? (I'm not sure if the dollar store is still selling six packs of Jolt and I'm morally against "extreme" doritos)
... with the money they make out of selling Perl books, they could easily fulfil a goodly part of the modest $55000 they talk about on this page. (Yes, I know 55k was the *2001* budget.)
But dunno how much people will be willing to fork out to charity during tough times.. last year this time, things were much better.
Are these guys working on Perl.NET? Do I have to have a Passport account to donate?
Order today, and we'll include a Randal Schwartz at no additional cost!!!
This sig intentionally left justified.
That got me thinking: could the money be better used elsewhere? A $10 donation to a PERL hacker will buy him a six pack and some chips. $10 to the right humanitarian organization will literally save people's lives. But I guess that with donating to the PERL guys, you'll actually get to see some results from your charity. With most humanitarian groups you never know where the money goes.
And if we cut out all the extras* we spend money on we can feed a lot of people!!!
*extras mean anything other than basic food stuffs, no cable tv, nothing not absolutly needed for everyday life....
In this case I might go against my set ways, but if they'd set up an Honor System account I wouldn't be writing this note right now, I'd be donating!
I ordered a Tim Conway awhile back because he was on clearance. The first sales rep didn't even know they still had one around. Well, they sent me a Damian Conway instead. I couldn't get him to do the "Dorf" bit, and he wouldn't wear stupid clothes or talk like a Norwegian at all. I tried to return him, but they wouldn't take him back because when I opened the box, I automatically agreed to their EULA which was inside.
Finally, after several weeks of complaining they let me ship him back for an exchage. Except they accidentally sent me Conway Twitty this time. Actually I'm not so sure it was an accident. Anyway, Conway Twitty happily does a norwegian accent so I'm fairly satisfied. Except he keeps trying to seduce my grandma...
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Perhaps the Perl community could calculate some recommended annual contribution per line of code for companies that use Perl. (E.g. 100k lines of code at $0.01/line/year = $1000.) Do some comparisons with how much companies pay for commercial compilers compared to how many lines of code they have to show them that they are getting a good deal (applying corrections for the absence of tech support and manuals not being included in the price.)
Of course, the Perl Foundation is not the only ligitimate recipient of such contributions.
Quattuor res in hoc mundo sanctae sunt: libri, liberi, libertas et liberalitas.
Actually, you wanna see something would really twist C's noodle? Try this one:
push(@list, "element${_}") for (1 .. 20);
And of course, there are all sorts of cool things built into Perl. Like the "spaceship" operator, regexes, the || and && operators returning the last value evaluated (as opposed to 1 or 0), about five hundred ways to iterate/loop, $_, etc. There's also my personal favorites: lack of strong (any, really) typing and being able to create any type of variable/structure on the fly. They're also Perl's largest complaints, which is probably why I'm so partial to them. There's nothing like being able to just make a "$foo = 123;" statement and then append a string to it... :-)
But the orginal poster was correct: Perl can be very complex. It can also be very simple. It's like they say, Perl makes easy things easy and hard things possible. I love having enough rope to hang myself; others need more structure. To each his own. Choice is a very good thing.
-B
Ash and Hickory, straight-grained and true, make excellent bludgeons, dandy for the cudgeling of vegetarians.
Damian has a nice description of things he wants to work on at the yetanother.org link above (terrible color scheme, btw - only suitable for very late-night browsing).
And who are they going to "buy" if they can only raise half the necessary funds?
The more examples I see of this the more I've come to see that the open-source development model is getting less and less credible as a way to do large-scale projects.
Developing software using the proprietary model may not always produce the greatest code, but there's no doubt that it provides a good income to thousands of developers with average skills that allows them to support their families.
On one hand: This is great for Perl. Anyone who has dabbled in the language knows that Damian has Plans for Perl what we mere mortals can never truly understand. I'm still drooling over the thought of a proper switch statement in Perl. As for curried expressions, well, if they're anything as good as curried chicken, I'm all for it.
On the other hand: There's a whole generation of Monash University students growing up without having the joy of being taught by Damian. The poor things are getting substandard teaching (well, actually, they're probably getting standard teaching; what I know they're not getting is superstandard teaching), and they are graduating without the fond memories of the acted-out-in-lectures singles-bar analogy for C++ polymorphism. (You Monash graduates know what I'm talking about.)
On the gripping hand: I'm easily the next-best Perl programmer to be teaching at Monash University. With Damian out of the way, it's only a matter of time before total domination of Monash is mine . . .
Actually Larry got laid off in the recent cuts at O'Reilly.
Matt. Want XML + Apache + Stylesheets? Get AxKit.