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Advent Calendar For Geeks
bLanark writes "Well, as children and adults all over the world begin their day with chocolate, with the traditional Advent calendar, I'd like to remind you that there's an alternative for geeks. The Perl Advent calendar will give you a new Perl tip every day right up to Christmas."
This year you are being visited by three ghosts.
The ghost of preprocessor directives.
The ghost of just-in-time debugging.
And finally...
The ghost of lazy evaluation.
The Perl community has more advent calendars than the one linked in TFA:
(Catalyst, Plack and Dancer are web frameworks)
Good thing that Perl is dead. Just imagine how it'd overflow the internet with advent calendars if it were alive!
I hadn't noticed that. How did I miss all the New Year TV specials, the radio stations playing New Year music 24/7, the throngs of New Year shoppers, etc?
Not any more, of course. When I was growing up, there were all these New Year celebrations. I remember the booze, the pointy hats, the grand public displays featuring dioramas of Father Time and Baby New Year. Good times...
Then, some time during the 2020's I think, the protests began. The Chinese were first, of course, complaining that January 1 wasn't their new year, bitching about how offended they were whenever anybody wished them a "Happy New Year!" in the beginning of January. "America is a diverse country," they would say, "and we should respect and honor ALL new year's celebrations equally. And besides, we built your fuckin' railroads, it's the least you could do, right?" The ACLU got involved when the Pagans starting acting up, noting that "The New Year begins November 1. In fact, you wouldn't even have ANY new year if it wasn't for our sun god! Goddam Christians just co-opted our New Year like they did everything else of ours!" The floodgates were opened then. Muslims, Hindus, 7th Day Adventists -- who even *knew* their were enough census-registered Klingons to get tlhIngan Qummem declared a National Bank Holiday every tenth month?
Yeah, "Happy New Year," those were the days. Egg nog and Guy Lombardo, and the ball dropping in Time Square. Back when you could drop balls in Times Square, without the cubes and rhomboids challenging it in the courts...