Live Nightclub Hacking

I like perl by Slashbot+Hive-Mind · 2004-09-02 01:45 · Score: 5, Interesting

'm going to stick my neck out and say I like Perl -- so I think this is good news. However, I've always thought of Perl as a text-processing language, and In My Limited Experience, mobile phones can only fit about ten words on the screen. {on the other hand, this could simply lead to phones with bigger screens.}

There's no denying that you can write really ugly code in Perl, but you can also write beautiul code in Perl. I think some of the people who knock Perl are confusing "undisciplined" with "not anal retentive". Perl was always based around the idea of serving the end rather than the means -- it's about where you're at, rather than how you got there. It does not impose a particular style on the programmer. Thus, for any given task, there could be many, many ways to accomplish it in Perl.

They're all right.

Some will be faster than others, some will use fewer resources than others, some will look prettier then others when viewed as source. But if you don't care enough about those things to mention them in the design spec, then they don't matter.

Now, you can have your fancy object-oriented stuff, but in many ways it's overkill. For instance, if you needed to write a programme involving geometry, you could create an Angle object which would have a value assumed to be in radians and properties for its sine, cosine, tangent and representation in degrees; a Distance object which would have properties for its representation in different measuring units; and assigning a value to any property would affect the object and therefore its other properties. It might be beautiful if you like the OO concept, but it's a bit overkill if you just want to find the missing side of a triangle.

And does a "disposable" programme -- one that you will run only a few times before forgetting it forever -- really need to look pretty anyway?

As for PHP, well, it really isn't much different from Perl -- apart from always needing to put brackets around function parameters, the fact that all variables start with a $ sign whether scalar, array or hash and there is no $_. {I happen to love $_. It goes nicely with the concept of an accumulator. If you never did any assembly language, you probably won't know what I'm talking about, though}. That is hardly surprising, because the original PHP was actually written in Perl to be like a kind of subset of Perl.

Also, one of my little niggles -- and I freely admit that this is just my own opinion -- is the inability to get on with any language that uses the plus sign as the string concatenation operator while letting you freely mix string and numberic variables. {*cough* ruby *cough*} I expect "2" + 2 to equal 4, not 22. Hell, if I have to do something to my variables before I can add them, that just nullified the advantage of having freely-mixable scalar types! It might as well be a strict-typed language and barf on an expression such as "2" + 2!

As for Python - well, it's not my cup of tea {I guess you like either Perl or Python} but other people seem to have written some pretty good stuff in it, so I shan't knock it.

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We are the collective Slashbot HiveMind

Re:I like perl by maximilln · 2004-09-02 07:08 · Score: 2, Interesting

The amount of bookkeeping the type systems of Pascal, C, Java, and C++ force on the programmer is significant

I don't see that as a bad thing. Writing routines to draw boxes, circles, requesters, dialogs, or windows is a significant load on programmers. Eventually programmers created libraries such as the svgalibs and evolved towards X11. X11 inherited additional functionality through interfaces such as GTK, Qt, GDK, KDE libs, or whatever Windows uses. The area isn't really my forte but it shows that if a large and cumbersome task is needed again and again the programmers will write libraries to handle the necessary manipulations.

With languages that attempt to intuitively guess at manipulating variables of different types there's no need to work on refining a system to generate numerical values from strings or to think of strings as numerical values (ML). If that very basic division is a constant reminder to the programmer that a "420" isn't really a 420, combined with the considerations of what it's going to take to turn that set of ASCII values into the proper number, some of it may carryover the next time someone else's library is #included.

If you're concerned about programmer productivity, efficacy, and correctness

Heh. :-) That's a bean-counter issue, not a programming issue. We all know that the managers want more code, faster, with fewer noticeable bugs, and they want it last quarter. I feel this is why the proprietary code industry constantly reinvents itself with new featureware. The latest programming language can just as easily be a product of the push for featureware or the latest end-around flanking maneuver to hedge in the market with IP. Strictly speaking it can't compete in quality with the code produced by enthusiasts who don't have deadlines and don't have a corporate agenda that needs them to use the latest macro library in order to use features which will justify a patent or IP lawsuit.

A language that forces you to think about the storage size and layout of every variable is certainly strict, but is that really the kind of strictness that prevents errors

It's certainly not the only mode of thought that prevents errors. You and I both know that good programming is like good health--there's no single magic secret. If the programmer develops the intricate mode of thought it will aid their programming just as a routine of gentle exercise aids health. You just need to remember to do it often enough for it to eventually become an embedded mode. In today's world being pedantic about variables isn't stressed because enough languages make the correct assumptions (and because managers don't like to have their superiority challenged). I feel that the overall model created explains why security isn't a strong point in proprietary code. The reason is both economical and philosophical.

That may be true, but all things are not equal

You're right. I don't program for a living so I can afford to preach from the philosophical armchair of ideality. :-) I've found that if I talk about the ideal points of my own industry (pharmaceutical R&D) the people above me on the corporate ladder turn quite rude.

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+++ATHZ 99:5:80
Re:I like perl by Camel+Pilot · 2004-09-02 07:46 · Score: 2, Interesting

Well good example, but look at this way - is harder to understand

@lst = sort { $a $b } @unsorted_lst;

Or the 30 or so lines of code it would take to do the equivalent sort in C?

Alex performs live on stage to program his music ? by Gopal.V · 2004-09-02 01:53 · Score: 2, Interesting

> Alex programmes live on stage to perform his music

Did he actually mean , "Alex performs live on stage to program his music" or did he mean the other way around ?

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Quidquid latine dictum sit, altum videtur

I Do Both, But Not Simultaneously by Greenisus · 2004-09-02 02:01 · Score: 4, Interesting

I am a software developer by day, and DJ at a night club by night. The idea of programming live is really cool to me, but when I'm DJing with my computer, I'm scared to run anything other than the DJ software, because I can't have ANY lag. I do, however, write software at home to help my DJ gigs.

Unbelievable by Lovedumplingx · 2004-09-02 02:05 · Score: 2, Interesting

What no one has touched on is that coding, hard in and of itself, and writing music on the fly, also very hard, and doing it live leaves no margin of error.
What if he makes a keystroke error? Wouldn't that have the possibility of destroying his whole set?
This is just too incredible for words.

Patterns by UncleBiggims · 2004-09-02 02:06 · Score: 2, Interesting

A good friend of mine often compares programming to music. He studied jazz improvistion at the college level and is now a programmer... so I feel like he has a good insight into this sort of thing. One quote that really made sense to me was, "Traditional jazz improvisation is all about trying to fit creative and spontaneous music composition on top of somewhat predictable chord progressions."

This is what many programmers try to do... develop creative solutions using predictable software design patterns. I guess Alex Mclean has found a way to be creative AND spontaneous with his coding.

"Structured" Perl by notthepainter · 2004-09-02 02:06 · Score: 2, Interesting

I was hired to write a program to parse and modify some Postscript files. Perl was the obvious choice. So I learned Perl for the job, wrote the script, etc...

As you may know, Perl can be very unreadable and I don't write unreadable code. It was all broken down into functions etc.., all fully commented. Probably slow, but we didn't care, it was maintainable.

So years pass, a friend is learning Perl so I show it to her. Her first comment was, "That doesn't look like the Perl the guys write at work!"

Well, I thought it was funny...

Alex Giving a Talk in London a Week Today by twoshortplanks · 2004-09-02 02:13 · Score: 4, Interesting

Alex will be giving the London Perl Mongers a talk (and live demo) on his work in the evening of Thursday 9th September in central London. It's our normal technical meeting and alongside Alex, we'll be featuring talks by Simon Cozens (the current perl.com editor), Tom Husins, and I'll be talking about Perl Testing project.

I'm just working thought the details of the venue now and I'll post a follow up to this thread once I've sorted them out. As always, we're pleased to welcome new faces. Oh, and if anyone wants, they can pop along to the pub for our monthly social tonight.

Slashdot, your local friendly pub invite list.

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-- Sorry, I can't think of anything funny to say here.

Use CSOUND by adam872 · 2004-09-02 02:50 · Score: 2, Interesting

Real men use CSOUND for "programmed music" :)

Seriously, csound is designed as a programming language for music and is phenominally powerful and can be used in real time. If I were hacking code for music onstage, that is what I would use. Having said that, I'd rather use my guitar or synth(s) as they are the ultimate in "live composition" instruments...

Bah! by BarryNorton · 2004-09-02 03:03 · Score: 1, Interesting

Imagine what one could do with a real language... http://haskell.org/libraries/#music

INAPH and have don't have MIDI by Kalak · 2004-09-02 03:07 · Score: 3, Interesting

INAPH, but I'm curious to experience the music. Since I live in BFE, I'm not likely to go to any perl hacking nightclubs (plus, married with 2 kinds, who am I kidding, I'm not going to any nightclubs).

I want to hear the music!

Talking about audio w/o at least a sample is like talking code w/o a Hello World at least. So some perl hacker out there want to take his code snippets and to the right thing and put a MIDI file up somewhere for us to listen to? mp3?

Don't make me get curious enough to dive into Perl for fun. I do too much coding at work, and I don't want to be a coder at home.

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I am, and always will be, an idiot. Karma: Coma (mostly effected by .hack)

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