Slashdot Mirror
Perl is Sweet Sixteen
surflorida writes "Perl turned sweet 16 yesterday. 'Larry Wall released Perl 1 on this day in 1987, so today Perl is 16 years old. Happy birthday Perl! You can read more about the timeline of Perl releases in perlhist.pod and at history.perl.org.' Happy birthday Perl! You are now old enough to get a US drivers license."
For once the "you belong in a zoo" version of Happy Birthday is applicable.
But too old for Michael Jackson. Go ahead, mod me down! Muahahaha! ;)
Better lock up the car keys...
because what hunting rifle has a bayonet lug
At long last. PERL is legal!
http://siokaos.org/
Only 2 more years until shes legal, boys ;)
I've left to find myself. If you happen to see me, please, keep me there until I return.
it's no longer considered statutory...
My other sig is an import.
I could just imagine the kind of drivers license issued to Perl. First off, it would have a magnetic stripe, barcode, brail, and RFID encoded driver's license number on the back. The photo would be in the visual, infra-red, and ultraviolet spectrums. The license itself would be an actual 4d hypercube turning into your social security card, credit cards, gas cards, library cards, and translations of all the above into every language depending on the licenses orientation in space-time. In the event of emergency, the license would also be a flotation device and in the rare case of ending up on a desert island can be turned into a Swiss army knife and satellite GSM phone with GPS capabilities. Biometric identification built into the license allows it to change into the proper license for whoever is holding it. The license would be powered by a kinetic energy system similar to no-wind watches. It would also have a backup fusion generator, solar cells, hydrogen fuel cells, lithium ion battery banks, and be expandable for anti-mater generators once they become available.
Then you would lose it and it would be eaten by a snake.
Karma: SELECT `karma` FROM `users` WHERE `userid`=138474;
Yes. but it's only allowed to execute code until 11pm...and its parents damn well better not find out that it forks around, because it needs parental permission to kill a child process(should it fail to handle variables safely.)
Oh, and the kernel keeps a shotgun by the front door just in case any Java applets come around asking if Perl can go to the movies...
Please help metamoderate.
Happy birthday Perl! You are now old enough to get a US drivers license
hmm... i didn't know you needed a license to ride a camel
Marge, get me your address book, 4 beers, and my conversation hat.
Keep It Simple Stupid.
I guess we really can say Perl is sweet 16, never been KISS'd.
Don't think of it as a flame---it's more like an argument that does 3d6 fire damage
We built a world-class business on the back of Perl. Nothing else would have done the trick.
THANKS LARRY.
It's not the mothers' sob stories. It's the facts. Teenagers have an extremely high accident rate. They are inherently bad drivers, every one of them. It was foolish of the state to allow me behind the wheel of a car when I was 16. I'm much better now that I know that "yes, you can die, asshole!" Let's rephrase that for the dense teenagers (all teenagers are dense) here in slashdot: You are NOT immortal.
BTW, my daughter is now a teenager and is doing the countdown to when she can get her permit and license. I highly recommend that in 2 years you stay off the roads. It won't be safe.
-- Will program for bandwidth
Actually come to think of it, I was in 4th grade and now am in my mid 20's. Hmmmm
:)
Dude. You are old. I spent most of 1987 being 3 years old (the last month or so, I was 4!). I finished grade 4 in 1994.
You old fart! Who let you onto the internet?
"Perl looks like an explosion at an ASCII factory" - I forget who said that.
:help the damned.
Here's a fun one. (Forgive me, I've had one too many Jack and Cokes). In VIM, enter
It'll come back with "There is no help for the damned"
Har har har. THat kills me. Time for another drink.
Mod down people who tell people how to mod in their sigs
Only on slashdot, geeks make jokes about having sex with a programming language...
Maybe it can finally learn to speak english then ;^)
It's better to vote for what you want and not get it than to vote for what you don't want and get it.
- E. Debs
Well I graduated high school in 1987 so you young whipper-snappers quit yer damn "old" comments and get the hell of my net socket before i call the cops.
http://saveie6.com/
This means that Pearl is also legal to have sex with in most states. So, if you want to give Pearl a "pearl necklace," go right ahead. Just make sure there is no drinking involved as that might jam you up with the law
Welcome to the land of the free...pay toll ahead...no photography...please open your bag...
Suppose Larry had used his considerable brainpower to make an interpreted version of C or C++, instead of making a completely new language?
i remember, oh, about 5 years ago, when i first met perl. it was the first language that i could actually do something in. even though i was using only a subset, mostly cgi stuff, and yet, i had POWER. i had several web sites up and running, data driven, mostly flat file stuff, but especially my school site, with 100 teachers, they could post homework, news, etc., we had a whole content driven site. all from perl with no database. i use java and python, as well as obj-c and cocoa, but damn, for me, there is still nothing like my first real love. perl.
My problem? I was perfectly gruntled, until some numbnuts came by and dissed me.
I couldn't afford a car for you to drive, but I have this really nice camel, chicks dig a camel.
Learn something new.
About the same amount of time it will take them to finish Perl 6!
It's an important milestone...0x10 years old! Whoo-hoo!
(the bold was added by me)
here
You forget - we're the United States of America, that's states plural. The state I grew up in (and no, not that long ago) issued me a driver's license when I was not quite 14 years old. And some states require you to be 18 or something like that. It really seems incongruent, until you look at the reasoning. In extremely rural states, it's hard to operate the family farm if the kids can't drive.
$message = $age ge 16 ? "Legal" : "Illegal"; echo $message;
That's all true, but almost anything that you can do in any of those languages you can do in Perl with 1/4 the code and in 1/8 the time.
So by sweet sixteen you are implying that a language that many geeks use is female? this makes sense now.
touch perl
finger perl
mount perl
Life is like pants... fit in or you don't fit in.
I feels it's just as good as any other as a first language. From my perspective about all you get at first regardless of language is just a notion of variables, control structures and functions. New programmers never use the special features of whatever language they are on at the time as they don't know how to properly use them quiet yet. Once you feel you have the basics down all you need to learn going to other langues is some syntax. Good luck, have fun and don't give up. :)
-Dom
I've been programming perl for almost a decade, after learning it for a system administration job at UnixOps at the University of Colorado.
For those who work in Linux, Unix, or MacOS, I have a useful collection of well documented perl scripts for manipulating data and metadata from the command line.
Most useful are newpl, which creates a full-featured template as a starting point for new perl scripts, and ren-regexp which can manipulate filenames on the command line using a chain of regular expressions. Happy birthday perl!
Michael.
Linux : Mac
Sweet Sixteen is an older computer language designed by Steve Wozniak (see http://oldcomputers.net/byteappleII.html and http://www.fadden.com/dl-apple2/sweet16.txt) for the apple ][ and is a little less bloated than Perl.
Teenagers have an extremely high accident rate.
I believe that one of the main failures here is the conservativeness of driving schools. They believe the way to do things is to put teens behind the wheel and make em drive like grandmas, with the completely absurd expectation that they will continue driving like grandmas for the rest of their lives.
The fact is, they don't, and neither does anyone else. All of that driver's training is worth shit because accidents don't happen when a car is being driven normally; it occurs at the very edge of the vehicle's performance. Sometimes you may be dumb and on the offense, other times you are defending yourself because of another driver's mistake, but either way, if you don't know how your car handles at the limit, you may not do the right thing.
Saab used to give everyone who bought a new 9-3 Viggen a chance to drive it on a closed course with professional drivers (an intensive three day course as I recall.) Everyone I've heard who's been through the program said they learned more about driving there than many years of experience.
Expensive, yes, but a $500-$2000 investment in a professional driving training on a closed course like the one mentioned above is what our new drivers really need.
Not to mention that you get the added benefit of (potentially) getting all the high speed stupid driving out of the teen before they get on the road.
That _anybody_ got laid in the '80s is enough of an eye-opener for me.
I think it all depends on what setting the new programmer is learning.
In an academic setting, there is a lot more room for teaching abstract concepts and giving a more thorough explanation than might be available in a self-taught environment. Also, there is a basis behind computer science that is completely language independent and requires a fundamental understanding of key concepts that might be best learned by writing 30 lines of C code for something that is implemented in perl using two lines. Things like linear linked lists and pointers come to mind.
I learned perl outside of an academic setting and thought I had a fairly good grasp of what was going on. Some of the things that myself or coworkers (mostly the coworkers) implemented using perl blow my mind to this day. But my understanding of programming concepts was way off. Things like good algorithm design, memory management, data abstraction, etc., were all essentially foreign concepts to me.
I've ranted long enough. I guess the point I'm trying to make is that people can learn as many languages as they want on their own, but unless they understand how and when to do things a certain way and why, their code is quite possibly no better than a "noble effort".
I'm not trying to troll here. I've just started realising over the past couple of weeks how important formal CS training is to good programming skills. Maybe psuedo-code is the way to go?
Actually I don't find the special cases very confusing at all. Perl has a specific paradigm... its hard to understand without working on it, but once it clicked for me, it became the easiest language I work with, beating out Visual Basic, QuickBasic, C++, COBOL... Those languages(except QuickBasic) still have their advantages, but once you learn Perl, its easy.
Its learning curve can be steep however, but once you get there, it pays off big.
...I can't understand a thing that it is saying!
Not trolling! I love Perl dearly 8^)
"Send an Instant Karma to me" - Yes
Only if you write your code that way.
Yes, Perl makes it possible to write obfuscated code, but it does not enforce it. Perl makes it possible to write perfectly clear code.
But then again, even the most obfuscated code can be made clear with some well-placed comments, but comments in programs unfortunately appears to be a dying art.
Karma: Frotzed (mostly due to the Frobozz Magic Karma Company)