Live Nightclub Hacking

rjjm writes "Alex Mclean has written a stormin' article at perl.com on Hacking Perl In Nightclubs. Alex programmes live on stage to perform his music."

Comments

I like perl

[Slashbot Hive-Mind]

'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.

I Do Both, But Not Simultaneously

[Greenisus]

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.

Alex Giving a Talk in London a Week Today

[twoshortplanks]

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.

INAPH and have don't have MIDI

[Kalak]

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.