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Paul Graham On 'Great Hackers'
dcgrigsby writes "Always interesting, if not unbiased, Paul Graham has published a new article on 'Great Hackers', discussing why Perl and Python are apparently better than Java, on why Microsoft developers get offices, and a host of other sure-to-be-controversial stuff."
Wow, first post!
Remember the recent incident at LANL with the missing disks and the work being halted and the employees getting suspended?
Well, apparently, the disks never existed. Somebody doing a project thought he would need 4 disks, and so put the paperwork through for clearance to create 4 disks, but he only ended up needing 2 disks. So, when the inventory check went through, the paperwork indicated that 2 disks were missing, even though they never existed.
This news hasn't hit the press yet, but I got it from a trusted source working on the investigation at LANL. (He works at the lab I work at as well)
Cool! But, doesn't this still mean that the accounting system is screwed up? (While acknowledging that the users are vindicated).
Wow, slashdot controversial? I never would have imagined such a thing...
(sarcasm, mind you)
Paul's a really smart guy. I enjoy his writing, and I always read it. But it feels like reading text on an 80-column screen written by someone on an Atari 800. When you resize the screen, the text doesn't get wider. There's a huge whitespace gap to the right of the text.
This probably seems somewhat irrelevant, but I'm saying it here because I'm hoping that Paul or someone who knows him will notice and fix it - it's a shame to have this writing presented in such a difficult-to-read fashion.
Good article, by the way. I don't entirely agree with what's being said here, but I think it's an excellent tangent to a core idea the circumference of which one might better grasp, having read it.
[n/t]
Yup Anonymous Coward could *really* do with karma. Idiot.
Or maybe you're just desperate to slag somebody off? Hint: He posted AC - not much karma value in that.
Then I had to actually interact with Yahoo! Stores. Is it just me or is the usability lousy? Is it just me or does the sales process suck? Maybe whomever ported it broke it?
He can write. Maybe he can code. His approach to user interaction blows.
Wow, now that bit of flotsam was straight outta 1999!
eat shiat and bark at the moon
What do Trolls choose when they can choose freely? Most of them choose Natalie Portman, GNAA, and men exposing their sphincters in a very graphic manner. It therefore follows that any organization which has Natalie Portman and exhibitionist gay men will be a good trolling organization.
___
It's the end of my comment as I know it and I feel fine.
Perl lets you write code the way you want. It lets you write obfuscated code that is impossible to maintain two months down the road. It also lets you write code that is clean, modularized and extremely easy to maintain.
Perl's strengths are not only in its dynamic nature, the CPAN module archive and its user base. It is also a very powerful language that is beautiful to those who have more coding experience than Teach yourself X in 21 days.
-- wolverian
Hmm... Last I checked, Perl was not an ideal language for writing "large bodies of maintainable code." In fact, it was quite the opposite.
;-)
;-)
I don't know about ideal, but it is not hard to write and maintain large bodies of clean and readable code in Perl. On the other hand, you can *also* write totally obfuscated weirdo oneliners. Because it is flexible.
Bad (or just plain evil) programmers can write bad and ugly code in any language, good programmers can write good gode in almost any language. Can't very well say any, because there are such beasts as BF out there.
Most of the time, the people I know who wrote Perl couldn't understand what they did just 2 weeks later.
Well, those aren't programmers. At least not yet. Perl has - built in, mind you! - more rules, checks and syntactic helpers than most languages - if you chose to turn them on. Most good programmers do, however they are off by default so quick oneliners on the commandline and lightning 5-line quick and dirties can be pulled off as well.
TIMTOWTDI (There Is More Than One Way To Do It) sums up the whole philosophy. Spend some time at places like http://www.perlmonks.org/ and then come back and tell me that most Perl programmers create code that can't be maintained.
Spine World