The Dumbold Voting Machine for The Sims enables the simulated people in your virtual dollhouse to vote! It's an interactive "get out the vote" public service message, in the form of a free downloadable Sims object. This Sims object is an electronic voting machine that lets your Sims vote between four candidates: Kerry, Bush, Nader and Badnarik.
I've included informative text in this Sims object, which it displays in illustrated dialogs to educate players about electronic voting machines.
A major side-show is the "Monkey" item on the pie menu, which activates all kinds of cool easter eggs, and displays lots of in-game information and news about electronic voting machines.
Please give this Dumbold Voting Machine a good pounding on, and tell me if you have any problems (besides the usual problems endemic to electronic voting machines, which I've programmed into this Sims object on purpose).
At first look, it appears to be a fully functional voting machine. But it actually has a lot of fatal bugs and hidden features, just like real electronic voting machines!
The Dumbold Voting Machine web page describes and illustrates some of the easter eggs, including:
Baxter the Chimpanzee Erases the Voting Log.
Vote or Die!
You punched out the screen!
Osama Bin Laden Scares the Piss Out of You!!!
Accidentally Voting for Pat Buchanan.
News about Black Box Voting.
News about CalTech-MIT/Voting Technology Project.
News about Diebold.
News about EFF.
News about Verified Voting.
Dumbold Voting Machine Operating Instructions.
The Dumbold Voting Machine for The Sims enables the simulated people in your virtual dollhouse to vote! It's an interactive "get out the vote" public service message, in the form of a free downloadable Sims object. This Sims object is an electronic voting machine that lets your Sims vote between four candidates: Kerry, Bush, Nader and Badnarik.
I've included informative text in this Sims object, which it displays in illustrated dialogs to educate players about electronic voting machines.
A major side-show is the "Monkey" item on the pie menu, which activates all kinds of cool easter eggs, and displays lots of in-game information and news about electronic voting machines.
Please give this Dumbold Voting Machine a good pounding on, and tell me if you have any problems (besides the usual problems endemic to electronic voting machines, which I've programmed into this Sims object on purpose).
At first look, it appears to be a fully functional voting machine. But it actually has a lot of fatal bugs and hidden features, just like real electronic voting machines!
The Dumbold Voting Machineweb page describes and illustrates some of the easter eggs, including:
Baxter the Chimpanzee Erases the Voting Log.
Vote or Die!
You punched out the screen!
Osama Bin Laden Scares the Piss Out of You!!!
Accidentally Voting for Pat Buchanan.
News about Black Box Voting.
News about CalTech-MIT/Voting Technology Project.
News about Diebold
News about EFF.
News about Verified Voting.
Dumbold Voting Machine Operating Instructions Instructions
PostNuke is the Easy-Bake Over of content management systems, that lets kids cook cute little cupcakes with a 60 watt lightbulb.
It's well known to be riddled full of security holes, it's horrible to maintain or extend, it looks and feels unprofessional, and it falls apart under pressure.
Kids, if you want a real content management system like grown-ups use, you should download Plone. It's high quality free open source software, it works great right out of the box, it's secure, and it cooks a lot better than a 60 watt lightbulb.
You can't google for "NeXT" because google is case insensitive, and you won't get many relevant results. That's the real reason why Microsoft had changed the name of "COM" to "ActiveX".
Google has made it much more important to give companies, products and projects uniquely spelled names, so they can be easily found.
I'm just asking you to be aware of the problems and limitations of the langauges you choose to use, and don't sweep them under the rug or pretend they don't exist. like Bush justifying the invasion of Iraq.
If you didn't already know those points I raised about Perl and the fundamental problems of "DWIM" programming languages, then you're simply not a competent programmer. The information is out there, go look it up and learn it yourself.
My point is that there are a lot of incompetent Perl programmers out there who are oblivious to the fact that they should be using much better languages, and not polluting their minds and the environment.
I'm against using Perl for the same reasons I'm against using DDT, Asbestos and Lead. They may have seemed like convenient, expedient shortcuts at the time, but you absolutely must consider their debilitating long term effects.
Of course, I've written many lines of code. I learned Perl in the 80's, thought it was disgusting then, and still think it's disgusting now.
-Don
Plan 9 focuses too closely on Files
on
Rob Pike Responds
·
· Score: 1
The problem I had with Plan 9 was that it took the silly Unix "everything is a file" philosophy and ran with it. Which would be nice if everything were a fail, but everything isn't.
I always thought that "ioctl" was conclusive proof that Unix's approach to files was fucked. To base the whole operating system around files is far too specialized and narrowly focused.
Instead of files, now the latest fads are XML/RPC/SOAP's "everything is a procedure call" philosophy which is battling it out with REST's "everything is a representational state" philosophy. When is somebody going to write an operating system that performs system calls and talks to device drivers by fetching URLs?
Oh yeah, that's called the Internet. "/dev/coffeemachine" is now "http://www.coffeemachine.com".
-Don
Re:If You Want a Serious Answer... Don't Get Cute
on
Rob Pike Responds
·
· Score: 1
You're right, programming is definitely much more like candle making. Not a thing like woodwork. Where does that guy get off?
-Don
Patents as the solution for Arms Control
on
Rob Pike Responds
·
· Score: 2, Funny
Patents could be as signifigant as Arms Control, if they could be used to solve the Arms Control Problem. Just grant the MPAA non-expiring patents on nuclear bomb technology, and let them go after the terrorists and rogue nations! I bet they'd be a lot more effective than Bush.
Kyle is injured playing dodgeball and must go to see the school nurse. He's terrified because of the stories he's heard. When he sees the nurse, she looks fairly normal, except for the dead fetus sticking out the side of her head. Kyle's mother educates the boys on Nurse Gollum's affliction and then decides that everyone in South Park should be made aware of the condition. Meanwhile, the South Park Cows dodgeball team goes to the state, national and finally the international finals in China, thanks to the vicious balls thrown by Pip.
Kenny dies when a Chinese thrown dodgeball sends him flying into the back wall.
So why do you choose to use a language whose OO facility you admit is quite the abortion? Python and Ruby and other languages have 100% of the power of Perl, with well design OO facilities, without the cojoined fetus attached to the side of the head.
It just astounds me that people cling to such an abortion of a language, while rejecting Python for such a shallow reason as white space indentation. Most people who complain about that problem haven't actually tried programming in Python, and they come back later and say that it doesn't bother them at all once they get used to it. If your real complaint is just that you don't like being forced to indent your code, then you should go get a job at McDonalds instead of programming.
The reason COBOL and FORTRAN "should have been thrown out" has nothing to do with "white space parser tokens". The problem is that there are enormous amounts of legacy code written in COBOL and FORTRAN, which is extremely expensive and difficult to maintain or upgrade, because its behavior is impossible to untangle thanks to the language's lack of modularity and support for programming in the large. And that's exactly the same problem that Perl has, and the reason that Perl should be thrown out, but never will be.
People are finally beginning to wake up to the problems of Perl. Perl is like DDT and Asbestos:
It's been used for far too long without considering its long term side-effects, and now it's everywhere polluting the environment. DDT was the ultimate "DWIM" pesticide, as Perl is the ultimate "DWIM" language. Just as the Asbestos Abatement Industry removes hazardous material from buildings, and the Cobol Abatement Industry removed Y2K bugs from code, the Perl Abatement Industry rewrites the code of failed dot-com companies whose intellectual property has been bought up by bigger dot-com companies. Not nice work, but it pays well because it's working with hazardous materials.
Python is no less expressive or powerful, and no more complicated or harder to learn, because of white space indentation. It was a well thought out trade-off, whose upside vastly outweighs its downside. White space indentation makes code easy to read, and it forces sloppy people to clean up their act, which is a good thing.
If you accept Perl's abortion of an OO system, then why do you reject Python's white space indentation? Learning another language would give you a better sense of perspective.
"If you follow the style guide and conventions... One has to invest some time in studying Perl. It grows on you."
It's sad how many Perl programmers have invested so much prescious time learning their way around Perl's fractally complex syntactic surface area and nip picking legalistic style guides and conventions, that they're unwilling to consider learning other languages. Monolinguistic Perl programmers are afraid to learn other languages because they're under the mistaken belief that programming languages are necessarily complex and hard to learn. They're afraid to admit that they've wasted so much time learning Perl's nuances, when they could have used a better language and invested that time in solving problems instead of memorizing trivial syntactic details.
If Perl was designed well in the first place, you would not need all those nit picking legalistic style guides and conventions to tell you which parts of the language never to use, which parts don't work together with each other, and how it breaks down under so many different situations.
The concept of "DWIM" programming languages is doomed to failure. The Lisp community figured that out many years ago.
There is no excuse for Perl being so badly designed, nor for Perl programmers refusing to admit and trying to cover up its flaws.
If you're a Perl programmer who doesn't know what Perl's weaknesses are yourself, and you have to ask me to spell them out for you, then you're an Incompetent Perl Programmer. You should have done that research yourself before deciding to use Perl. Shame on you! Put down the crack pipe and step away from the keyboard.
Incompetent Perl programmers who can't see or admit the flaws in their language are like the illegitimate president George W Bush who is out of touch with the harsh reality of Iraq and the economy, and therefore incapable of solving the problems. Incompetent Perl Programmers and Illegitimate US Presidents need to face the reality before they're qualified to solve the problems.
Aaron Weiss said:
It's not a secret that Perl is structurally flexible, and the conventional wisdom is that Perl gives you "enough rope to hang yourself". Funny. But that's not the gripe -- go ahead, hang yourself if you want. That's freedom. The problem is that Perl also gives you enough rope to hang others."
Eric Naggum said:
It's not that perl programmers are idiots, it's that the language rewards idiotic behavior in a way that no other language or tool has ever done.
Peter da Silva said:
The syntax is awkward, overcomplex, has too many obscure special
cases (there's to many obvious examples to list, I'll just mention
one of the obscure ones: the way scalars and collections in for
loops are treated), and the result is that you have to not just
"know Perl" you have to be a Perl language lawyer just to avoid
wandering into a dark alley and getting figuratively mugged by some
cool feature.
In the Switch documentation, Damian Conway said:
BUGS:
There are undoubtedly serious bugs lurking somewhere in code this funky:-) Bug reports and other feedback are most welcome.
LIMITATIONS:
Due to the heuristic nature of Switch.pm's source parsing, the presence of regexes specified with raw ?...? delimiters may cause mysterious errors. The workaround is to use m?...? instead. Due to the way source filters work in Perl, you can't use Switch inside an string eval.
Matt McLeod said:
But the moment you try to anything properly, try to modularize and,
you know, do perverted things like *reusing code*, it becomes a pain
in the arse. One exciting feature I came across recently is that
under certain circumstances you can create what seems like a module
which exports a bunch of names, but if you don't start the name with
an upper-case character it only exports the first. And it won't
*tell* you this is what is going on (even with -w and use strict),
it just whines that it can't find &main::foo() when it's supposed
to be getting &thing::foo().
Don't even get me started on the flatten-all-arguments-into-
a-list-of-scalars bullshit. Or the lack of any decent support
in the basic language for datastructures other than lists.
I'm sorry, walking through an array of arrays of hashrefs
is not a substitute for a record/struct datatype, and having
to fight it's alleged OO model to use a third-party "class"
do what would be a simple job in anything else is completely
not acceptable to me.
Lars Marius Garshol said:
Casting of operands in comparisons: induced errors.
Redefinition of some C keywords: walltrap.
Overcomplexity 1: suffix condit
SWIG is an excellent open source tool for plugging C++ and C code and libraries into Python and other programming languages.
I can't say enough good things about SWIG. It's an amazing piece of work that has saved me years of menial labor and enabled me to integrate all kinds of compex code into Python, from hairy C++ templates to third party Win32 libraries for which there is no source code. It works extremely well with Python, and many other languages too.
SWIG is a software development tool that connects programs written in C and C++ with a variety of high-level programming languages. SWIG is primarily used with common scripting languages such as Perl, Python, Tcl/Tk and Ruby, however the list of supported languages also includes non-scripting languages such as C#, Common Lisp (Allegro CL), Java, Modula-3 and OCAML. Also several interpreted and compiled Scheme implementations (Chicken, Guile, MzScheme) are supported. SWIG is most commonly used to create high-level interpreted or compiled programming environments, user interfaces, and as a tool for testing and prototyping C/C++ software. SWIG can also export its parse tree in the form of XML and Lisp s-expressions. SWIG may be freely used, distributed, and modified for commercial and non-commercial use.
Programming in Perl is terribly irresponsible and foolishly self indulgent. It's like maturbating in public and not cleaning up after yourself.
If you choose to program in Perl, the poor suckers who are going to have to read, maintain, clean up and modify the code you wrote will hate your guts.
Programming languages should be designed primarily for PEOPLE to read, understand, write and maintain reliably, and only incidentally for computers to interpret and execute.
Perl goes against every rule in the book about readability, simplicity, learnability, maintainability, integrity, responsibility to the community and style. And for no good reason!
The naively celebrated fact that Perl always has 2 dozen special case syntaxes, idioms, implicit rules and perverted styles to write the same thing, adds absolutely no power to the language whatsoever, and just makes it harder to read, write and maintain.
Even if you're just writing "throw away" Perl code, not working on anything important enough to reuse or share with other people, you're still crippling yourself with lazy bad habits that will doom you when you get a real job or start working on a project worth sharing with other people.
Sales Skyrocket After Media Expose' on Bag Labels.
Tom Bihn designs T-shirts based on labels; all proceeds to go to homeless veterans's charity.
PORT ANGELES, WA: Tom Bihn, a Port Angeles-based company that designs, manufactures and sells laptop bags, messenger bags, backpacks and briefcases, has garnered worldwide media attention this week after a Web blog posted the contents of the label sewn into most bags.
The inside label carries instructions on washing and caring for the bags. Because the bags are sold in Canada, the instructions are also printed in French. The French version, however, contains an additional phrase: "NOUS SOMMES DESOLES QUE NOTRE PRESIDENT SOIT UN IDIOT. NOUS N'AVONS PAS VOTE POUR LUI."
Translated to English, the phrase reads, "We are sorry that our President is an idiot. We did not vote for him."
This week, reports have aired on Seattle, Chicago and California NBC affiliates, on Seattle's KOMO radio and the nationally syndicated Paul Harvey radio show, on MSNBC's "Countdown with Keith Olbermann", and on the Port Angeles cable station PNN. Bihn has fielded inquiries from German, Irish and other international media outlets.
The company has recorded record sales this week -- with sales more than double all previous weeks in the company's history. Customers have flocked to the Seattle and Port Angeles stores to scoop up the bags with the now infamous label. E-mails and calls have poured into the store, with many customers ordering directly from the company's Web site at www.tombihn.com.
The "secret" message began as an inside joke among seamstresses and staff at the Tom Bihn factory, and was apparently intended to poke fun at company's founder and president, Tom Bihn.
Bihn has created a t-shirt featuring the label, and will donate all proceeds of the sale of the shirts to the Seattle Vet Center, specifically towards its Homeless Vet Program. The t-shirt is available for purchase on its Web site and at its Seattle retail store.
Tom Bihn products are proudly made in its Port Angeles, Washington, factory.
Supplies are limited. Be controversial. Place your order today.
Note: Feelings run strong on this issue. If you have something to say, we want to hear it. Please post in our forums.
On the enthusiastic recommendation of Hugh Daniel, I bought a huge padded "Black Bag" big enough for two laptops from Tom Bihn's shop in Santa Cruz, CA, back around 1996.
It's huge and tough and build like a tank: It's got an enormous padded main compartment, a secondary full sized compartment big enough for another computer, a third full sized compartment with pockets for accessories, and a big zippered pocket on the outside.
After 8 years of constant abuse: All the seams are still well sewn and sealed on the inside and outside, so there are no loose threads or freys, like most backpacks develop. The fabric hasn't torn, the zippers have never broken or jammed. All top quality material and workmanship!
It's so well made, that it's still in excellent condition after 8 years. I would definitely get another one, but my old one still has years of use left in it.
His web site says:
"Tom Bihn has been designing and making bags for well over 20 years. The daypacks he made when he was 13 years old are still in use. And in Santa Cruz, California, where Tom grew up, his laptop cases and book bags are almost legendary."
Norman Wilson's account of the Jerq/Blit etc. is quite
complete and correct, though there was some recycling
of names. 'Jerq' actually was used quite early, when
Pike got interested in bitmap graphics. The name
was a takeoff on the Three Rivers Perq, which he (and I)
saw at Lucasfilm Ltd. while attending an early Usenix.
Blit was the slightly more PC version (suggested either
as part of BitBlt or "Bell Labs Interactive Terminal).
The originals used the Motorola 68000, and part of
the development messup was AT&T Computer systems'
decision to switch to the WE32000 processor with
consequent delay for porting and reworking.
The earliest versions were not quite as wonderful
in practice as Norman suggests for the later ones.
They were built by the Teletype corp. model shop
(in quantity of a few hundred) and downloading
the OS took several minutes at 1200bps--necessary
at startup, since they didn't have a ROM for the whole
thing, just enough for doing a download. They
were also static electricity antennas! Many
is the time that I would shift in my chair, then
touch the keyboard, only to have the terminal
reset itself. I developed the habit of putting my
hand on the heavy steel case before moving around.
On the other hand, the basic idea was architecturally
right (and the later commercial versions were not so
subject to static, and had ROM for the OS). They
were even nicer at 9600bps.
Has your vision of "A Jerq at Every Desk" been realized, or do we still have a long way to go before fully exploiting the potential of personal computers?
"Use perl to scan for all 10 digit primes and then look for the first one in e." [...] "or am I missing something?"
Yes, if you're using Perl by choice, you most certainly are missing something.
You will probably fail the job interview, because when you tell the people at Google that you used Perl by choice, instead of any of the other much more reasonable, cooler and pleasurable alternatives, they will laugh at you.
Seriously: the last job interview I was at, we were talking about programming languages, and they mentioned Perl. I winced and said something mildly disparaging but restrained. One of the guys interviewing me cheered "He doesn't like Perl! Hire him!" So I told them: don't get me started about how bad Perl is, but they definitely shouldn't hire me just because I think Perl sucks. I'd use it if I ever had to, but I've never run across a situation where there wasn't a much better alternative. Then I managed to steer the conversation out of that particular rat hold and back to talking about Python. I got the job!
We were eating dinner at a restraunt once, and John Gilmore ordered some crab soup. I teased him that I considered crabs to be insects, and he wasn't supposed to eat insects because he was a vegetarian.
I was all ready to launch an emotional defense of my indefensible biologically revisionist opinion about crabs being insects, but John headed me off at the pass: he said "Insects are The Enemy, so we Must Eat Them!"
Gilmore has radical ideas about Insect Control. We agree on the general principles, but disagree about how to go about implementing it. Ewww gross.
I wonder if eating bullets would be an effective approach to gun control?
Slashdot Mirror
-Don
The Dumbold Voting Machine for The Sims enables the simulated people in your virtual dollhouse to vote! It's an interactive "get out the vote" public service message, in the form of a free downloadable Sims object. This Sims object is an electronic voting machine that lets your Sims vote between four candidates: Kerry, Bush, Nader and Badnarik.
I've included informative text in this Sims object, which it displays in illustrated dialogs to educate players about electronic voting machines.
A major side-show is the "Monkey" item on the pie menu, which activates all kinds of cool easter eggs, and displays lots of in-game information and news about electronic voting machines.
Please give this Dumbold Voting Machine a good pounding on, and tell me if you have any problems (besides the usual problems endemic to electronic voting machines, which I've programmed into this Sims object on purpose).
At first look, it appears to be a fully functional voting machine. But it actually has a lot of fatal bugs and hidden features, just like real electronic voting machines!
The Dumbold Voting Machine web page describes and illustrates some of the easter eggs, including:
Baxter the Chimpanzee Erases the Voting Log. Vote or Die!
You punched out the screen!
Osama Bin Laden Scares the Piss Out of You!!!
Accidentally Voting for Pat Buchanan.
News about Black Box Voting.
News about CalTech-MIT/Voting Technology Project.
News about Diebold.
News about EFF.
News about Verified Voting.
Dumbold Voting Machine Operating Instructions.
-Don
The Dumbold Voting Machine for The Sims enables the simulated people in your virtual dollhouse to vote! It's an interactive "get out the vote" public service message, in the form of a free downloadable Sims object. This Sims object is an electronic voting machine that lets your Sims vote between four candidates: Kerry, Bush, Nader and Badnarik.
I've included informative text in this Sims object, which it displays in illustrated dialogs to educate players about electronic voting machines.
A major side-show is the "Monkey" item on the pie menu, which activates all kinds of cool easter eggs, and displays lots of in-game information and news about electronic voting machines.
Please give this Dumbold Voting Machine a good pounding on, and tell me if you have any problems (besides the usual problems endemic to electronic voting machines, which I've programmed into this Sims object on purpose).
At first look, it appears to be a fully functional voting machine. But it actually has a lot of fatal bugs and hidden features, just like real electronic voting machines!
The Dumbold Voting Machineweb page describes and illustrates some of the easter eggs, including:
Baxter the Chimpanzee Erases the Voting Log.
Vote or Die!
You punched out the screen!
Osama Bin Laden Scares the Piss Out of You!!!
Accidentally Voting for Pat Buchanan.
News about Black Box Voting.
News about CalTech-MIT/Voting Technology Project.
News about Diebold
News about EFF.
News about Verified Voting.
Dumbold Voting Machine Operating Instructions
Instructions
-Don
Plone runs on top of the Zope application server. Zope is quite secure, and it scales up reliably to manage huge web sites, like The Boston Globe.
-Don
It's well known to be riddled full of security holes, it's horrible to maintain or extend, it looks and feels unprofessional, and it falls apart under pressure.
Kids, if you want a real content management system like grown-ups use, you should download Plone. It's high quality free open source software, it works great right out of the box, it's secure, and it cooks a lot better than a 60 watt lightbulb.
-Don
Google has made it much more important to give companies, products and projects uniquely spelled names, so they can be easily found.
-Don
-Don
If you didn't already know those points I raised about Perl and the fundamental problems of "DWIM" programming languages, then you're simply not a competent programmer. The information is out there, go look it up and learn it yourself.
My point is that there are a lot of incompetent Perl programmers out there who are oblivious to the fact that they should be using much better languages, and not polluting their minds and the environment.
I'm against using Perl for the same reasons I'm against using DDT, Asbestos and Lead. They may have seemed like convenient, expedient shortcuts at the time, but you absolutely must consider their debilitating long term effects.
-Don
-Don
I always thought that "ioctl" was conclusive proof that Unix's approach to files was fucked. To base the whole operating system around files is far too specialized and narrowly focused.
Instead of files, now the latest fads are XML/RPC/SOAP's "everything is a procedure call" philosophy which is battling it out with REST's "everything is a representational state" philosophy. When is somebody going to write an operating system that performs system calls and talks to device drivers by fetching URLs?
Oh yeah, that's called the Internet. "/dev/coffeemachine" is now "http://www.coffeemachine.com".
-Don
-Don
-Don
Conjoined Fetus Lady
So why do you choose to use a language whose OO facility you admit is quite the abortion? Python and Ruby and other languages have 100% of the power of Perl, with well design OO facilities, without the cojoined fetus attached to the side of the head.It just astounds me that people cling to such an abortion of a language, while rejecting Python for such a shallow reason as white space indentation. Most people who complain about that problem haven't actually tried programming in Python, and they come back later and say that it doesn't bother them at all once they get used to it. If your real complaint is just that you don't like being forced to indent your code, then you should go get a job at McDonalds instead of programming.
The reason COBOL and FORTRAN "should have been thrown out" has nothing to do with "white space parser tokens". The problem is that there are enormous amounts of legacy code written in COBOL and FORTRAN, which is extremely expensive and difficult to maintain or upgrade, because its behavior is impossible to untangle thanks to the language's lack of modularity and support for programming in the large. And that's exactly the same problem that Perl has, and the reason that Perl should be thrown out, but never will be.
People are finally beginning to wake up to the problems of Perl. Perl is like DDT and Asbestos: It's been used for far too long without considering its long term side-effects, and now it's everywhere polluting the environment. DDT was the ultimate "DWIM" pesticide, as Perl is the ultimate "DWIM" language. Just as the Asbestos Abatement Industry removes hazardous material from buildings, and the Cobol Abatement Industry removed Y2K bugs from code, the Perl Abatement Industry rewrites the code of failed dot-com companies whose intellectual property has been bought up by bigger dot-com companies. Not nice work, but it pays well because it's working with hazardous materials.
Python is no less expressive or powerful, and no more complicated or harder to learn, because of white space indentation. It was a well thought out trade-off, whose upside vastly outweighs its downside. White space indentation makes code easy to read, and it forces sloppy people to clean up their act, which is a good thing.
If you accept Perl's abortion of an OO system, then why do you reject Python's white space indentation? Learning another language would give you a better sense of perspective.
-Don
It's sad how many Perl programmers have invested so much prescious time learning their way around Perl's fractally complex syntactic surface area and nip picking legalistic style guides and conventions, that they're unwilling to consider learning other languages. Monolinguistic Perl programmers are afraid to learn other languages because they're under the mistaken belief that programming languages are necessarily complex and hard to learn. They're afraid to admit that they've wasted so much time learning Perl's nuances, when they could have used a better language and invested that time in solving problems instead of memorizing trivial syntactic details.
If Perl was designed well in the first place, you would not need all those nit picking legalistic style guides and conventions to tell you which parts of the language never to use, which parts don't work together with each other, and how it breaks down under so many different situations.
The concept of "DWIM" programming languages is doomed to failure. The Lisp community figured that out many years ago.
-Don
If you're a Perl programmer who doesn't know what Perl's weaknesses are yourself, and you have to ask me to spell them out for you, then you're an Incompetent Perl Programmer. You should have done that research yourself before deciding to use Perl. Shame on you! Put down the crack pipe and step away from the keyboard.
Incompetent Perl programmers who can't see or admit the flaws in their language are like the illegitimate president George W Bush who is out of touch with the harsh reality of Iraq and the economy, and therefore incapable of solving the problems. Incompetent Perl Programmers and Illegitimate US Presidents need to face the reality before they're qualified to solve the problems.
Aaron Weiss said: It's not a secret that Perl is structurally flexible, and the conventional wisdom is that Perl gives you "enough rope to hang yourself". Funny. But that's not the gripe -- go ahead, hang yourself if you want. That's freedom. The problem is that Perl also gives you enough rope to hang others."
Eric Naggum said: It's not that perl programmers are idiots, it's that the language rewards idiotic behavior in a way that no other language or tool has ever done.
Peter da Silva said: The syntax is awkward, overcomplex, has too many obscure special cases (there's to many obvious examples to list, I'll just mention one of the obscure ones: the way scalars and collections in for loops are treated), and the result is that you have to not just "know Perl" you have to be a Perl language lawyer just to avoid wandering into a dark alley and getting figuratively mugged by some cool feature.
Nicholas Clark said: That indirect object syntax is worthy of hate. (I think)
In the Switch documentation, Damian Conway said: BUGS: There are undoubtedly serious bugs lurking somewhere in code this funky :-) Bug reports and other feedback are most welcome.
LIMITATIONS:
Due to the heuristic nature of Switch.pm's source parsing, the presence of regexes specified with raw ?...? delimiters may cause mysterious errors. The workaround is to use m?...? instead. Due to the way source filters work in Perl, you can't use Switch inside an string eval.
Matt McLeod said: But the moment you try to anything properly, try to modularize and, you know, do perverted things like *reusing code*, it becomes a pain in the arse. One exciting feature I came across recently is that under certain circumstances you can create what seems like a module which exports a bunch of names, but if you don't start the name with an upper-case character it only exports the first. And it won't *tell* you this is what is going on (even with -w and use strict), it just whines that it can't find &main::foo() when it's supposed to be getting &thing::foo(). Don't even get me started on the flatten-all-arguments-into- a-list-of-scalars bullshit. Or the lack of any decent support in the basic language for datastructures other than lists. I'm sorry, walking through an array of arrays of hashrefs is not a substitute for a record/struct datatype, and having to fight it's alleged OO model to use a third-party "class" do what would be a simple job in anything else is completely not acceptable to me.
Lars Marius Garshol said: Casting of operands in comparisons: induced errors. Redefinition of some C keywords: walltrap. Overcomplexity 1: suffix condit
Hey everybody: What's wrong with Perl?
-Don
I can't say enough good things about SWIG. It's an amazing piece of work that has saved me years of menial labor and enabled me to integrate all kinds of compex code into Python, from hairy C++ templates to third party Win32 libraries for which there is no source code. It works extremely well with Python, and many other languages too.
Here is the blurb from the web site www.swig.org:
SWIG is a software development tool that connects programs written in C and C++ with a variety of high-level programming languages. SWIG is primarily used with common scripting languages such as Perl, Python, Tcl/Tk and Ruby, however the list of supported languages also includes non-scripting languages such as C#, Common Lisp (Allegro CL), Java, Modula-3 and OCAML. Also several interpreted and compiled Scheme implementations (Chicken, Guile, MzScheme) are supported. SWIG is most commonly used to create high-level interpreted or compiled programming environments, user interfaces, and as a tool for testing and prototyping C/C++ software. SWIG can also export its parse tree in the form of XML and Lisp s-expressions. SWIG may be freely used, distributed, and modified for commercial and non-commercial use.
-Don
If you choose to program in Perl, the poor suckers who are going to have to read, maintain, clean up and modify the code you wrote will hate your guts.
Programming languages should be designed primarily for PEOPLE to read, understand, write and maintain reliably, and only incidentally for computers to interpret and execute.
Perl goes against every rule in the book about readability, simplicity, learnability, maintainability, integrity, responsibility to the community and style. And for no good reason!
The naively celebrated fact that Perl always has 2 dozen special case syntaxes, idioms, implicit rules and perverted styles to write the same thing, adds absolutely no power to the language whatsoever, and just makes it harder to read, write and maintain.
Even if you're just writing "throw away" Perl code, not working on anything important enough to reuse or share with other people, you're still crippling yourself with lazy bad habits that will doom you when you get a real job or start working on a project worth sharing with other people.
-Don
Sales Skyrocket After Media Expose' on Bag Labels.
Tom Bihn designs T-shirts based on labels; all proceeds to go to homeless veterans's charity.
PORT ANGELES, WA: Tom Bihn, a Port Angeles-based company that designs, manufactures and sells laptop bags, messenger bags, backpacks and briefcases, has garnered worldwide media attention this week after a Web blog posted the contents of the label sewn into most bags.
The inside label carries instructions on washing and caring for the bags. Because the bags are sold in Canada, the instructions are also printed in French. The French version, however, contains an additional phrase: "NOUS SOMMES DESOLES QUE NOTRE PRESIDENT SOIT UN IDIOT. NOUS N'AVONS PAS VOTE POUR LUI."
Translated to English, the phrase reads, "We are sorry that our President is an idiot. We did not vote for him."
This week, reports have aired on Seattle, Chicago and California NBC affiliates, on Seattle's KOMO radio and the nationally syndicated Paul Harvey radio show, on MSNBC's "Countdown with Keith Olbermann", and on the Port Angeles cable station PNN. Bihn has fielded inquiries from German, Irish and other international media outlets.
The company has recorded record sales this week -- with sales more than double all previous weeks in the company's history. Customers have flocked to the Seattle and Port Angeles stores to scoop up the bags with the now infamous label. E-mails and calls have poured into the store, with many customers ordering directly from the company's Web site at www.tombihn.com.
The "secret" message began as an inside joke among seamstresses and staff at the Tom Bihn factory, and was apparently intended to poke fun at company's founder and president, Tom Bihn.
Bihn has created a t-shirt featuring the label, and will donate all proceeds of the sale of the shirts to the Seattle Vet Center, specifically towards its Homeless Vet Program. The t-shirt is available for purchase on its Web site and at its Seattle retail store.
Tom Bihn products are proudly made in its Port Angeles, Washington, factory.
Supplies are limited. Be controversial. Place your order today.
Note: Feelings run strong on this issue. If you have something to say, we want to hear it. Please post in our forums.
It's huge and tough and build like a tank: It's got an enormous padded main compartment, a secondary full sized compartment big enough for another computer, a third full sized compartment with pockets for accessories, and a big zippered pocket on the outside.
After 8 years of constant abuse: All the seams are still well sewn and sealed on the inside and outside, so there are no loose threads or freys, like most backpacks develop. The fabric hasn't torn, the zippers have never broken or jammed. All top quality material and workmanship!
It's so well made, that it's still in excellent condition after 8 years. I would definitely get another one, but my old one still has years of use left in it.
Here's an article reviewing Tom Bihn's "Smart Alec" and "Monolith" bags. He has many models specifically designed for laptops, that you can order on his web site, and the prices are quite reasonable!
His web site says: "Tom Bihn has been designing and making bags for well over 20 years. The daypacks he made when he was 13 years old are still in use. And in Santa Cruz, California, where Tom grew up, his laptop cases and book bags are almost legendary."
-Don
The Jerq was the original name for the Blit -- a name that management didn't approve of, for some reason.
More info: AT&T 5620 (and Related Terminals) Frequently Asked Questions
And also: Can someone advise me regarding a gui for UNIX
From: Dennis Ritchie <dmr@plan9.bell-labs.com>
Norman Wilson's account of the Jerq/Blit etc. is quite complete and correct, though there was some recycling of names. 'Jerq' actually was used quite early, when Pike got interested in bitmap graphics. The name was a takeoff on the Three Rivers Perq, which he (and I) saw at Lucasfilm Ltd. while attending an early Usenix. Blit was the slightly more PC version (suggested either as part of BitBlt or "Bell Labs Interactive Terminal). The originals used the Motorola 68000, and part of the development messup was AT&T Computer systems' decision to switch to the WE32000 processor with consequent delay for porting and reworking.
The earliest versions were not quite as wonderful in practice as Norman suggests for the later ones. They were built by the Teletype corp. model shop (in quantity of a few hundred) and downloading the OS took several minutes at 1200bps--necessary at startup, since they didn't have a ROM for the whole thing, just enough for doing a download. They were also static electricity antennas! Many is the time that I would shift in my chair, then touch the keyboard, only to have the terminal reset itself. I developed the habit of putting my hand on the heavy steel case before moving around.
On the other hand, the basic idea was architecturally right (and the later commercial versions were not so subject to static, and had ROM for the OS). They were even nicer at 9600bps.
It's good to know that Norman is still using his.
Dennis
-Don
If you don't realize that Perl sucks, then you don't understand it yourself.
Want to read some reasonable, cool, pleasurable Python code?
Zope: http://www.zope.org
Plone: http://www.plone.org
-Don
"Use perl to scan for all 10 digit primes and then look for the first one in e." [...] "or am I missing something?"
Yes, if you're using Perl by choice, you most certainly are missing something.
You will probably fail the job interview, because when you tell the people at Google that you used Perl by choice, instead of any of the other much more reasonable, cooler and pleasurable alternatives, they will laugh at you.
Seriously: the last job interview I was at, we were talking about programming languages, and they mentioned Perl. I winced and said something mildly disparaging but restrained. One of the guys interviewing me cheered "He doesn't like Perl! Hire him!" So I told them: don't get me started about how bad Perl is, but they definitely shouldn't hire me just because I think Perl sucks. I'd use it if I ever had to, but I've never run across a situation where there wasn't a much better alternative. Then I managed to steer the conversation out of that particular rat hold and back to talking about Python. I got the job!
-Don
I was all ready to launch an emotional defense of my indefensible biologically revisionist opinion about crabs being insects, but John headed me off at the pass: he said "Insects are The Enemy, so we Must Eat Them!"
Gilmore has radical ideas about Insect Control. We agree on the general principles, but disagree about how to go about implementing it. Ewww gross.
I wonder if eating bullets would be an effective approach to gun control?
-Don