As a result of the over-flexibility, people have tried to impose "standards" on Perl. There are "standard" techniques for named parameters, "standard" techniques for accessor functions, etc. And that's nice, but Perl has 10,000+ available modules to do everything from screen-scrape Google news to access Oracle databases (it's greatest strength!!!). And not all those modules use the standard techniques.
Strange, because I only know of one way to supply named parameters to a call, an anonymous hash. OK, to be fair, there may be more, but none of them are reasonable, and as such, that's really the only employed method you see with CPAN^H^H^H^H those 10,000+ modules.
As for object syntax, your example of
sub new() {
my ($class) = @_;
my $self = {}
return bless $self, $class
}
is a little silly. Almost perfect (IMHO), but the first line makes it so (where's the my $class = shift;? By definition, the first argument to a call of Foo->new() is the class. Yes, it's Perl so there's More Than One Way To Do It(TM), but if someone can't write code that is reasonably congruent with the definitions set forth by said language, by all means, don't blame the language. Going back to the named parameter passing qualm you had, I'm sure I could certainly say the same thing about C by insisting that in my code, all parameters would be passed via a two-dimensional array, with a pointer to the parameter in the first dimension, and the value in the second; but that would just be silly, and everyone would laugh at the code (and not use it) when I posted it to CCAN;-P
Re:What I look for in using other peoples code
on
Finding New Code
·
· Score: 1
After searching the comments for "CPAN", I'm shocked that it isn't mentioned more (found 2 instances, at my level of filtering, anyway). It's such an excellent resource that, when I need to implement something at least a little out of the ordinary, it's the first place I turn. Modules are (generally) well documented, and the dependency-management aspect of the CPAN shell is excellent (can you imagine how wonderful it would be if RPM were that good?)
If there were C/C++ analogues of CPAN, the world would be a far better place. Why is CPAN a unique aspect of the Perl community?
Maybe it won't matter because it is going to be difficult to get enough people together who are fired up enough over the moral inconsistency found in the children of an RIAA company CEO downloading music while the RIAA prosecutes people who share music. Excuse this post for being patently trite.
There's something colloquially known as the Slashdot Effect. It's when a horde of us become fixated upon a particular point of interest. Traditionally, said point of interest is located on a webserver, and said horde proceeds to overwhelm the serving capacity of the point of interest in question. We've got the numbers.
Back to the matter at hand, the (seemingly Orwellian) irony of this makes me shudder -- you know, like Lewis-Black-aneurysm-style. I'll go ahead and posit that I'm not alone in this reaction.
So, what say (amongst all of us hardcore geeks), someone puts up a web form, ala "Mail your Congressperson", that would submit one's outraged, empassioned dissent regarding this to 5 major national newspapers? Anyone game?
"People" complain all the time about their inability to effect change because they're just an individual, but this is Slashdot, for fuck's sake. That's gotta be like, the fourth largest army in the world. Sarcasm aside, what all of us are witnessing here is real freedom of assembly by an informed populace (yes, I know this is Slashdot, and there's a certain percentage of those who in general don't RTFA, but you get my point).
My point is that we've got the numbers, but not the will to make ourselves heard on this matter. I'm serious about the webform, but I'll admit I don't have the basic knowledge to put such a thing together (shame on me). Especially one that could handle that kind of traffic.
This is a unique community, one with (sometimes) clear consensus regarding many disparate issues. Here's my vote for Slashdot moving from "Just the Facts, maam" reporting to directly sponsoring activism within the community it has fostered. You know, like, at the bottom of the story there's a "direct your outrage here" link. And if not, someone, please, step up and provide a vector for our voices to be heard on this particular issue; hypocrisy genuinely sickens me more than anything else in this world.
As for the libc question, I talked to Patrick himself at LinuxWorld, who predicted sometime around fall for a 2.1 Slack.
And as far as kernels are concerned, I've kept right with the pace of development, and have yet to have anything go buggy on me with this Slack 3.5 system.
Nice to see this show of force from the Slackware community btw!
After taking a look at the way the/etc and subdirs (read: rc.d -- ecch....) are set up on Redhat, I can certainly see why some people might be thrown off by it -- what a mess. As far as Redhat's distro being 'newbie-friendly', I think thats a big oops on their part.
I started out on Slackware and am still happily running it today -- to me it seems like a cleaner way to do things (as far as/etc is concerned, so no, this is not bait for a distro argument so dont blame me if one erupts;oP)
Machines in the picture (mildy off-topic)
on
Alan Cox Interview
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· Score: 1
I cant help but wonder..... is that a Sun IPC/IPX on the far left in the top picture? Sure looks like one to me, especially in conjunction with the keyboard next to it which appears to be a type 5.....
Slashdot Mirror
What about a beowulf of them?
I thought it used SlashCode... ;-P
DON'T LASE ME BRO!!!!
Strange, because I only know of one way to supply named parameters to a call, an anonymous hash. OK, to be fair, there may be more, but none of them are reasonable, and as such, that's really the only employed method you see with CPAN^H^H^H^H those 10,000+ modules.
As for object syntax, your example of
sub new() {
my ($class) = @_;
my $self = {}
return bless $self, $class
}
is a little silly. Almost perfect (IMHO), but the first line makes it so (where's the my $class = shift;? By definition, the first argument to a call of Foo->new() is the class. Yes, it's Perl so there's More Than One Way To Do It(TM), but if someone can't write code that is reasonably congruent with the definitions set forth by said language, by all means, don't blame the language. Going back to the named parameter passing qualm you had, I'm sure I could certainly say the same thing about C by insisting that in my code, all parameters would be passed via a two-dimensional array, with a pointer to the parameter in the first dimension, and the value in the second; but that would just be silly, and everyone would laugh at the code (and not use it) when I posted it to CCAN ;-P
After searching the comments for "CPAN", I'm shocked that it isn't mentioned more (found 2 instances, at my level of filtering, anyway). It's such an excellent resource that, when I need to implement something at least a little out of the ordinary, it's the first place I turn. Modules are (generally) well documented, and the dependency-management aspect of the CPAN shell is excellent (can you imagine how wonderful it would be if RPM were that good?)
If there were C/C++ analogues of CPAN, the world would be a far better place. Why is CPAN a unique aspect of the Perl community?
There's something colloquially known as the Slashdot Effect. It's when a horde of us become fixated upon a particular point of interest. Traditionally, said point of interest is located on a webserver, and said horde proceeds to overwhelm the serving capacity of the point of interest in question. We've got the numbers.
Back to the matter at hand, the (seemingly Orwellian) irony of this makes me shudder -- you know, like Lewis-Black-aneurysm-style. I'll go ahead and posit that I'm not alone in this reaction.
So, what say (amongst all of us hardcore geeks), someone puts up a web form, ala "Mail your Congressperson", that would submit one's outraged, empassioned dissent regarding this to 5 major national newspapers? Anyone game?
"People" complain all the time about their inability to effect change because they're just an individual, but this is Slashdot, for fuck's sake. That's gotta be like, the fourth largest army in the world. Sarcasm aside, what all of us are witnessing here is real freedom of assembly by an informed populace (yes, I know this is Slashdot, and there's a certain percentage of those who in general don't RTFA, but you get my point).
My point is that we've got the numbers, but not the will to make ourselves heard on this matter. I'm serious about the webform, but I'll admit I don't have the basic knowledge to put such a thing together (shame on me). Especially one that could handle that kind of traffic.
This is a unique community, one with (sometimes) clear consensus regarding many disparate issues. Here's my vote for Slashdot moving from "Just the Facts, maam" reporting to directly sponsoring activism within the community it has fostered. You know, like, at the bottom of the story there's a "direct your outrage here" link. And if not, someone, please, step up and provide a vector for our voices to be heard on this particular issue; hypocrisy genuinely sickens me more than anything else in this world.
As for the libc question, I talked to Patrick himself at LinuxWorld, who predicted sometime around fall for a 2.1 Slack.
And as far as kernels are concerned, I've kept right with the pace of development, and have yet to have anything go buggy on me with this Slack 3.5 system.
Nice to see this show of force from the Slackware community btw!
After taking a look at the way the /etc and subdirs (read: rc.d -- ecch....) are set up on Redhat, I can certainly see why some people might be thrown off by it -- what a mess. As far as Redhat's distro being 'newbie-friendly', I think thats a big oops on their part.
/etc is concerned, so no, this is not bait for a distro argument so dont blame me if one erupts ;oP)
I started out on Slackware and am still happily running it today -- to me it seems like a cleaner way to do things (as far as
I cant help but wonder..... is that a Sun IPC/IPX on the far left in the top picture? Sure looks like one to me, especially in conjunction with the keyboard next to it which appears to be a type 5.....
Oh well, thats my random curiosity for ya....
With all of the talk about RPM vs. .tar.gz, I'm suprised no one has mentioned the rpm2targz utility thats included in (at least) Slack 3.5
;oP
Its the only distro I've ever used, and I'm quite happy with it. Especailly after having a look at the rc.d dir on a friend's RedHat box... ecchh.