I don't want to put Perl down, but I think that its day is past except for those who, because they learnt it when it was the only thing around, are willing to tolerate its eccentricities.
Oh come on, the reasons to stick with perl are (1) the huge code base available on CPAN and (2) the perl programming culture.
Perl culture is in great shape at the moment, in my opinion. The most annoying people in the world have all switched to Python, and the dull, money-grubbing bastards are all off plodding through Java... the only "dark spot" on the horizon is Ruby, which might actually suck up enough
energy someday to bleed off interest in doing perl work.
But then, note that objects are just hashes. Sometimes, you get odd data in them, due to some bug. Where did that happen? Of course you use grep, but there are so many ways to put something into a hash, that you run into problems. So you use getters and setters and make sure that all the code everywhere uses them.
That's a pretty common way of implementing objects in perl, but it is, of course, not the only way...
The current thinking seems to be we should all switch to using "Inside-Out Objects" (briefly: object data
is moved to class data, and the object only needs to be a unique id to pick out the correct values from the
class data -- so you bless a scalar ref, and get a lightweight object which stringifies to a unique id). The point being that if you
do things this way, you really *have* to use the accessors, you can't cheat and treat the object as a hash
reference any more. Unfortunately, last I looked there was some argument about what precisely was the right
way to do this (there's some issue with thread support), though the best publicized way of doing it certainly
the one recommended by Damien Conway in his newish book "Perl Best Practices".
If you're not interested in re-writing your entire code-base to conform to someone's notion of
"Best Practices", myself I might suggest looking into "lock_keys" in the Hash::Util module.
You could adopt the practice of doing a lock_keys on the hashref at the end of the object/creation
initialization stage, and then if anyone accidentally tries to create a new hash field later,
it will throw an error. A simple, effective trick, and I wish it were better publicized...
On occasion I wonder how hard it would be to write an automated test that would look for
cases where someone has done a "$obj->{hash_field}"...
In general, coding standards are important, and where the language is really flexible, they arguably
become even more important -- but I think a lot of that problem can be solved with some good
automated testing. For example, there's a CPAN module called Perl::Critic that will do things for
you like check to make sure your code matches a given set of coding standards (it defaults to
Conway's "Best Practices", as I remember it).
I'm glad to see you New York boosters coming out of the woodwork, but I'm not the one who's
interested in an East vs. West fight... my contention is that the East coast media is --
in particular I've seen many whiney complaints about google in places like the
Wall Street Journal (how dare these young whipper snappers tell us that we've been
doing our IPOs wrong? And what about that "don't be evil" nonsense, are they accusing us
of being evil?).
It is certainly true that despite the many flaws of the New York Times
(and they're not small: Miller is gone but Gordon is still there).
in comparison, the West coast has yet to come up with a daily newspaper worth
paying much attention to. On the other hand, the British press kicks New York's ass...
even if you insist on a conservative bias, the Economist totally trashes the
American news weeklies.
Why exactly it is that the West coast press is in such poor shape is an interesting question...
back in the early internet era, the San Jose Mercury News was doing some interesting things
with combined print and on-line journalism... but there's the strange case of
Gary Webb who re-opened the
issue of the CIA-cocaine connection there, and got people annoyed enough that the Merc
backed down.
The current version of the San Francisco Chronicle, always a lame newspaper, is put out by
the Hearst corporation, and from what I understand is screwing up and losing money --
and this is the only daily newspaper in a city full of well-educated people who
are definitely readers (SF spends the most on books per capita of any city in the US),
and a fair number of them are politically concerned people who care about local news quite
a bit.
Once the Chronicle goes down... or maybe even if it doesn't, if Hearst continues to subsidize it...
there will be interesting times in San Francisco.
Basically, both places are awesome in different ways.
Not a point that I disagree with, really, but it doesn't change the
fact that I think the East fears the West...
If I'm sounding annoyed about it, it's because the East is still in
control of a large chunk of the newsmedia (and isn't doing all that
great a job, either, cf. Judith Miller formerly of the New York Times),
and whenever possible they run snarky stories about how Google doesn't
really know what they're doing, isn't managing to stay "not evil", and
so on.
re: "...argues that NY's business community is more important these days to startups than Silicon Valley's deep pool of talent. Do you buy this thesis? "
What I think is that the east coast businesses have been living in terror at the thought that
the center of the economy might move out from under them and head west, so this is something of a
"whistling in the dark"/"tell them what they want to hear" story.
"... any other result means no more Courts and anarchy reigns. Which is of course what most of the G8 protesters are into.."
If anyone cares I just thought I'd mention that there's a huge disconnect between what most people mean by "anarchy" and what people who call themselves "anarchists" usually mean by it. (And given that, one might wonder why someone would call themselves an anarchist, but there I can't help you...) Anyway, the wikipedia article on
Anarchism looks like a nice round-up of some of the different varieties.
In my experience, while the "libertarian anarchists" (aka the "right-wing" anarchists, or better, free market anarchists) like to speculate on how a society might be organized without government agencies, the more left-wing guys (e.g. the historical "libertarian socialists" for extra over-determined terminological fun) tend to be more pragmatically focused and usually seem like they'd be happy with a democratic socialist government (e.g. Sweden).
This guy has everything to lose and nothing to gain
Except a book deal when he gets out of prison.
That no one will read (unless Hugo Chavez holds up a copy of it on television).
This is a bit of a peeve with me, by the way, that conservative-types can't
conceive of the possibility that some lefty demonstrators might actually be
idealistically motivated. Maybe you've spent a little too much time reading
about the importance of "self-interest" in human motivations...
How far do you push this one? Should we shrug off everything
Bush says because he's probably just angling for a book deal and a speaker
tour after he's termed out?
Actually, the law has required reporters to turn over confidential sources in case of certain classes of crimes for *years* if not *decades.* I see no reason he shouldn't turn over his videotape; it shows a violent riot with physical attacks on bystanders, police, etc.
He says that the evidence they claim they're looking for isn't on the tape.
He's offered to show it to judge, but the prosecution says that's not good enough.
Whether Josh was talking from his cell or from the phone in the hall or from an interrogation chamber is moot. While I'd like to give props to our system that at least lets the incarcerated communicate with the rest of is . . . I'll also have to condemn the same system for jailing Mr. Wolf in the first place.
True enough. And in the interview, Josh Wolf praises the prison guards for what he calls a suprising degree of professionalism in dealing with inmates, which, from talking with the other inmates, he gathers is a difference between a federal jail and a state-level one.
Mumia Abu-Jamal has been doing radio broadcasts "live from death row" for some time now.
Well why do they want this video so badly? Because it supposedly incriminates somebody. So unless the guy wasn't aware of what was going on or was trying to stop it and can prove it in court then that makes him an accessory or at the very least in some places guilt of not being a good samaritan (which in some jurisdictions is at least on the books as illegal).
I think they claim that the video has evidence of someone attempting (not succeeding) to set fire to a police car. According to the interview, Josh Wolf has offered to let the judge review the video himself to decide if there's any such evidence there. The prosecutors insist that it must be the Grand Jury that sees it, not just the judge working on Wolf's case -- why this would be isn't entirely clear (there's information the prosecutor doesn't want to give to the judge, but is willing to give to the grand jury?).
Another issue is that Josh Wolf doesn't want to be compelled to testify about the people in the video -- it's possible, for example, that he can identify some of them, even if they're wearing masks.
He can go around videotaping events like this in-part because he's trusted not to provide this testimony -- so this would seem like a classic case of a journalist trying to shield the anonymity of sources, just updated for the video/internet age.
And of course, one answer to the "why do they want it so badly?" is that they probably don't, they're just using this as a harassment tool. The government doesn't particularly like demonstrations to be covered by journalists, and they don't much like the idea of freelance "citizen journalists".
There isn't in fact, anything particularly ridiculous about the concept of
Orbiting Solar Power Satelites/Sun Shades -- it might not actually work, but
on the other hand there might be ways to get it to work, and you can get
a clean power source out of it as well as a possible global warming amelioration strategy:
I realize it bugs environmentalist-types to think about amelioration, but it's looking like we need
to do pretty much everything we can think of at this point. The skeptics seem to miss the fact that while
it's at least possible that the consensus could be wrong, that includes the possibility that things are
even worse than they say they are... e.g. it appears that the arctic ice is melting much faster than expected.
It'll be, uh, interesting to see if the influx of fresh water manages to deflect the gulf stream and plunges
Europe into another little ice age, eh?
(Why is it so hard to convince people to replace coal power with nuclear? Coal burning is killing something like 20,000 people a year in the United States... you can't come up with a nuclear accident scenario that gets anywhere
near that level, and that's without putting fears of green house gasses on the table.)
Why is there always so much Perl bashing that goes on here.
Because you see, despite the fact that programmers like to pretend that they're
supremely rational they're actually as faddish as a bunch of teenagers.
This was one of the featured stories in yesterday's broadcast of Democracy Now:
According to a new survey, hundreds of government scientists say they have perceived or personally experienced pressure from the Bush administration to eliminate phrases such as "climate change" and "global warming" from their reports and public statements. One of those scientists -- NASA climatologist Drew Shindell - testified Tuesday before the Committee on House Oversight and Government Reform.
If it matters to you, Bezos is clearly a "Red" (i.e. Republican)...
(I find that most Amazon customers don't seem to know this).
If you examine the buyblue.org data for political contributions by
bookstores,
you'll see that Amazon is a solidly republican company, as opposed
to Barnes and Nobels, which is solidly Democratic.
Notably, Borders makes no political contributions at all.
And myself, I try to shop at Stacey's, an
independant San Francisco store that, while a rather large place,
appears to be too small for buyblue.org to bother to report on them.
The home user is. XM can't sell the ability to recieve(broadcast) + record signals. They can sell the ability to recieve, but not to record them at the same time. Only individuals are allowed to record, and apparantly only by using third party hardware.
If it is (a) legal to be in the broadcasting business and (b) legal to manufacture a home stereo with tuner and tape recorder, why would it be illegal to be in both businesses?
I can imagine a licensing restriction placed on people in category (a), but I have my doubts there are any that really apply.
They're not in the business of selling recordings, but rather selling people the ability to make recordings.
I really which the courts would make up their minds. Is "time-shifting" okay, or isn't it?
Responses to the usual responses
on
Who won?
·
· Score: 1
Quick responses to the usual talking points that have been trotted out:
Freeman is biased -- maybe, but the heart of his argument is based on statistical analysis, rather than the usual political ranting.
oh you're just a conspiracy nut like those 9/11 truth moment guys -- Nope. I think the 9/11 truth guys are crazy too. Their arguments are largely circumstantial when they don't violate physics. There's no comparison between that stuff and the case that Freeman and Bleifuss lay out.
statistics can be made to say anything -- is that supposed to impress anyone at slashdot? Bogus statistical arguments are relatively easy to expose.
but you don't have any real evidence, it's just statisitcs -- No, what we have is statistical evidence. Can you throw someone in jail with this? No. Is this good enough to justify investigating the problem? Hell yeah.
maybe bush fans won't talk to pollsters -- Yes, that's the "The Reluctant Bush Respondant Theory". It sounds good, but doesn't hold up, it has multiple problems. Read the summary in the review.
exit polls really aren't reliable -- there have been some odd quirks in exit polls -- and these are discussed in this book -- but overall they certainly are reliable. More importantly we have no other check on the election results at this point. Electronic voting makes undectable fraud possible. So now what?
oh this is just sour grapes, the democrats do it too -- repeat after me: this is a non-partisan problem. If you care about the integrity of a democratic republic, you care about election integrity.
If concerns like this are just shrugged off, then the America Republic is dead.
what are you complaining about, the democrats won in 2006 -- with razor thin margins. There's an argument that the landslide would've been even bigger, save for election corruption. 2006 was hardly free of irregularities: we are not out of the woods yet.
Re:Media's Strange Reluctance to Report...
on
Who won?
·
· Score: 1
There were endless media stories trying to sow doubt about Bush's legitimacy.
Name two. Note: The RFK article in Rolling Stone, and the HBO documentary "Hacking Democracy" were
both released after this book was written and published.
You might try reading the book if you'd like to know what the argument is:
it discusses the media reaction to the 2004 election, and it definitely agrees
with my memory of what happened:
Anyone questioning the results were immediately shrugged off as those damn internet
conspiracy theorists, long before the people writing the articles had a chance to
even look into the discrepancies.
Well this is a golden oldie... a book review that I wrote months
ago. Thankfully (per my request) they deleted my election
predictions that I closed the article with (I was only
half-right, if you care).
This morning, the Senator from Maryland spent her entire
seven minutes at the Judiciary Committee Hearing talking
about the "Voting Rights Act" and recent election irregularities
in Maryland.
Also despite the authors claims, exit polls HAVE been inaccurate historically. In 2000 exit polls declared Gore the clear winner of Florida. The exit pollsters were so sure of it that they called Flordia early for Gore, before the conservative voters in the panhandle even got out to vote!
You need a better example. You also might actually read the book if you want to see an analysis of the
reliability of exit polls.
Others say that Republicans are less likely to answer exit polls. I can believe that with the political climate as it is today.
That's the reluctant Bush respondant theory. To see that refuted, you could try reading the review.
What's wrong with going to raves when you're 50? I know plenty of people older than that who go. It's good exercise, keeps you young. Or are "old people" (50 is not very old) just supposed to lead quiet boring lives?
Yeah, I know. The entire thread is kind of disgusting (you've got to be normal to succeed! If you're not normal, well gee, what do you expect?)
For what it's worth, I've never noticed John Draper smelling like
two week old fish, either. Nor have I noticed him having Asperger's disease, though he's a mildly odd guy, so who the hell knows.
(You know, there's no rule that says all geeks must become billionaires... Draper is not the only uber-geek who didn't manage
to cash-in. There is, for example, the one guy from the homebrew computing club who got the idea to start a computer repair business that just staggered along for years while all his old freinds struck it rich.)
Slashdot Mirror
CRCulver wrote:
Oh come on, the reasons to stick with perl are (1) the huge code base available on CPAN and (2) the perl programming culture.
Perl culture is in great shape at the moment, in my opinion. The most annoying people in the world have all switched to Python, and the dull, money-grubbing bastards are all off plodding through Java... the only "dark spot" on the horizon is Ruby, which might actually suck up enough energy someday to bleed off interest in doing perl work.
That's a pretty common way of implementing objects in perl, but it is, of course, not the only way... The current thinking seems to be we should all switch to using "Inside-Out Objects" (briefly: object data is moved to class data, and the object only needs to be a unique id to pick out the correct values from the class data -- so you bless a scalar ref, and get a lightweight object which stringifies to a unique id). The point being that if you do things this way, you really *have* to use the accessors, you can't cheat and treat the object as a hash reference any more. Unfortunately, last I looked there was some argument about what precisely was the right way to do this (there's some issue with thread support), though the best publicized way of doing it certainly the one recommended by Damien Conway in his newish book "Perl Best Practices".
If you're not interested in re-writing your entire code-base to conform to someone's notion of "Best Practices", myself I might suggest looking into "lock_keys" in the Hash::Util module. You could adopt the practice of doing a lock_keys on the hashref at the end of the object/creation initialization stage, and then if anyone accidentally tries to create a new hash field later, it will throw an error. A simple, effective trick, and I wish it were better publicized...
On occasion I wonder how hard it would be to write an automated test that would look for cases where someone has done a "$obj->{hash_field}"...
In general, coding standards are important, and where the language is really flexible, they arguably become even more important -- but I think a lot of that problem can be solved with some good automated testing. For example, there's a CPAN module called Perl::Critic that will do things for you like check to make sure your code matches a given set of coding standards (it defaults to Conway's "Best Practices", as I remember it).
I'm glad to see you New York boosters coming out of the woodwork, but I'm not the one who's interested in an East vs. West fight... my contention is that the East coast media is -- in particular I've seen many whiney complaints about google in places like the Wall Street Journal (how dare these young whipper snappers tell us that we've been doing our IPOs wrong? And what about that "don't be evil" nonsense, are they accusing us of being evil?).
It is certainly true that despite the many flaws of the New York Times (and they're not small: Miller is gone but Gordon is still there). in comparison, the West coast has yet to come up with a daily newspaper worth paying much attention to. On the other hand, the British press kicks New York's ass... even if you insist on a conservative bias, the Economist totally trashes the American news weeklies.
Why exactly it is that the West coast press is in such poor shape is an interesting question... back in the early internet era, the San Jose Mercury News was doing some interesting things with combined print and on-line journalism... but there's the strange case of Gary Webb who re-opened the issue of the CIA-cocaine connection there, and got people annoyed enough that the Merc backed down.
The current version of the San Francisco Chronicle, always a lame newspaper, is put out by the Hearst corporation, and from what I understand is screwing up and losing money -- and this is the only daily newspaper in a city full of well-educated people who are definitely readers (SF spends the most on books per capita of any city in the US), and a fair number of them are politically concerned people who care about local news quite a bit.
Once the Chronicle goes down... or maybe even if it doesn't, if Hearst continues to subsidize it... there will be interesting times in San Francisco.
Not a point that I disagree with, really, but it doesn't change the fact that I think the East fears the West...
If I'm sounding annoyed about it, it's because the East is still in control of a large chunk of the newsmedia (and isn't doing all that great a job, either, cf. Judith Miller formerly of the New York Times), and whenever possible they run snarky stories about how Google doesn't really know what they're doing, isn't managing to stay "not evil", and so on.
DreadfulGrape wrote:
What I think is that the east coast businesses have been living in terror at the thought that the center of the economy might move out from under them and head west, so this is something of a "whistling in the dark"/"tell them what they want to hear" story.
If anyone cares I just thought I'd mention that there's a huge disconnect between what most people mean by "anarchy" and what people who call themselves "anarchists" usually mean by it. (And given that, one might wonder why someone would call themselves an anarchist, but there I can't help you...) Anyway, the wikipedia article on Anarchism looks like a nice round-up of some of the different varieties.
In my experience, while the "libertarian anarchists" (aka the "right-wing" anarchists, or better, free market anarchists) like to speculate on how a society might be organized without government agencies, the more left-wing guys (e.g. the historical "libertarian socialists" for extra over-determined terminological fun) tend to be more pragmatically focused and usually seem like they'd be happy with a democratic socialist government (e.g. Sweden).
That no one will read (unless Hugo Chavez holds up a copy of it on television).
This is a bit of a peeve with me, by the way, that conservative-types can't conceive of the possibility that some lefty demonstrators might actually be idealistically motivated. Maybe you've spent a little too much time reading about the importance of "self-interest" in human motivations...
How far do you push this one? Should we shrug off everything Bush says because he's probably just angling for a book deal and a speaker tour after he's termed out?
He says that the evidence they claim they're looking for isn't on the tape. He's offered to show it to judge, but the prosecution says that's not good enough.
TSAG wrote:
True enough. And in the interview, Josh Wolf praises the prison guards for what he calls a suprising degree of professionalism in dealing with inmates, which, from talking with the other inmates, he gathers is a difference between a federal jail and a state-level one.
Mumia Abu-Jamal has been doing radio broadcasts "live from death row" for some time now.
I think they claim that the video has evidence of someone attempting (not succeeding) to set fire to a police car. According to the interview, Josh Wolf has offered to let the judge review the video himself to decide if there's any such evidence there. The prosecutors insist that it must be the Grand Jury that sees it, not just the judge working on Wolf's case -- why this would be isn't entirely clear (there's information the prosecutor doesn't want to give to the judge, but is willing to give to the grand jury?).
Another issue is that Josh Wolf doesn't want to be compelled to testify about the people in the video -- it's possible, for example, that he can identify some of them, even if they're wearing masks.
He can go around videotaping events like this in-part because he's trusted not to provide this testimony -- so this would seem like a classic case of a journalist trying to shield the anonymity of sources, just updated for the video/internet age.
And of course, one answer to the "why do they want it so badly?" is that they probably don't, they're just using this as a harassment tool. The government doesn't particularly like demonstrations to be covered by journalists, and they don't much like the idea of freelance "citizen journalists".
There isn't in fact, anything particularly ridiculous about the concept of Orbiting Solar Power Satelites/Sun Shades -- it might not actually work, but on the other hand there might be ways to get it to work, and you can get a clean power source out of it as well as a possible global warming amelioration strategy:
I realize it bugs environmentalist-types to think about amelioration, but it's looking like we need to do pretty much everything we can think of at this point. The skeptics seem to miss the fact that while it's at least possible that the consensus could be wrong, that includes the possibility that things are even worse than they say they are... e.g. it appears that the arctic ice is melting much faster than expected. It'll be, uh, interesting to see if the influx of fresh water manages to deflect the gulf stream and plunges Europe into another little ice age, eh?
(Why is it so hard to convince people to replace coal power with nuclear? Coal burning is killing something like 20,000 people a year in the United States... you can't come up with a nuclear accident scenario that gets anywhere near that level, and that's without putting fears of green house gasses on the table.)
Because you see, despite the fact that programmers like to pretend that they're supremely rational they're actually as faddish as a bunch of teenagers.
As always, the Democracy Now site has a transcript of this up, as well as audio files if you'd like to listen to it: Government Scientists Accuse Bush Administration of Interfering, Misleading on Climate Change
If you examine the buyblue.org data for political contributions by bookstores, you'll see that Amazon is a solidly republican company, as opposed to Barnes and Nobels, which is solidly Democratic.
Notably, Borders makes no political contributions at all.
And myself, I try to shop at Stacey's, an independant San Francisco store that, while a rather large place, appears to be too small for buyblue.org to bother to report on them.
gerf wrote:
If it is (a) legal to be in the broadcasting business and (b) legal to manufacture a home stereo with tuner and tape recorder, why would it be illegal to be in both businesses?
I can imagine a licensing restriction placed on people in category (a), but I have my doubts there are any that really apply. They're not in the business of selling recordings, but rather selling people the ability to make recordings.
I really which the courts would make up their minds. Is "time-shifting" okay, or isn't it?
Well this is a golden oldie... a book review that I wrote months ago. Thankfully (per my request) they deleted my election predictions that I closed the article with (I was only half-right, if you care).
This morning, the Senator from Maryland spent her entire seven minutes at the Judiciary Committee Hearing talking about the "Voting Rights Act" and recent election irregularities in Maryland.
And I see this is a subject she's talked about for some time now: Mikulski Says Voting Rights Act Needed Now More than Ever That's a press release from July 20, 2006.
The "Free Press" guys out in Ohio are of the opinion that the great Democratic landslide of 2006 would've been even larger without corrupt elections: Missing votes in Ohio call races into question, January 3, 2007
You need a better example. You also might actually read the book if you want to see an analysis of the reliability of exit polls.
That's the reluctant Bush respondant theory. To see that refuted, you could try reading the review.
Hey, you're challenging one of the cherished principles on which the web was based.
The next thing you know, you're going to be talking about the separation of document id from location.
I'm getting lost on the analogies, as usual, but I am concluding that if I want to avoid idiotic discussions, it's my job to stop reading slashdot.
dangitman wrote:
Yeah, I know. The entire thread is kind of disgusting (you've got to be normal to succeed! If you're not normal, well gee, what do you expect?)
For what it's worth, I've never noticed John Draper smelling like two week old fish, either. Nor have I noticed him having Asperger's disease, though he's a mildly odd guy, so who the hell knows.
(You know, there's no rule that says all geeks must become billionaires... Draper is not the only uber-geek who didn't manage to cash-in. There is, for example, the one guy from the homebrew computing club who got the idea to start a computer repair business that just staggered along for years while all his old freinds struck it rich.)
This is an interesting initial study, but result was no doubt skewed by the large prevalence of Americans in the monolingual set.
Great idea. Have you ever heard of XML?
(Since the problem we'd like to solve is hard, let's solve an easy problem instead. Even though that's been done already.)
If you want people to know you're running linux, try The Debian Store.