So, you know why perl sucks, but you don't know enough to have any samples handy other than one you say is from an O'Rielly book: as others have noted, it won't compile, but that's not even the point.
Perl has more than its share of haters, but look at what is built in perl: banking systems, systems used in genomics, on Wall Street, those automated Amazon warehouses, this discussion board where those who don't know Perl declare boldly that it is useless.
The language is widely used by engineers in various industries to solve all sorts of problems that have nothing to do with CGI or servlets and which have no need for the do-it-yourself memory management of C or the strict object structure of Java.
The Homer Simpson reaction is commonplace, wherein newbies look at a section of perl code and declare it to be "hard to read" or whatnot. Perl is extremely easy to read if coded by someone who cares about such things. Perl is difficult to learn, but learning it unlocks the real power.
C is never easy to read. And as for Python, its a cool language, but where is the CPAN? the vaults of parnyssus is much less organized and mature than CPAN, and there's way too much 0.01 releases. Python is perl with better object structure, no CPAN and no curly brackets. Its biggest problem is that Perl was first, and many of us will continue to use perl.
The CPAN note is an especially important one here in the real world: You can get a CPAN module that will assist in pretty much any IT-related task you could think of.
In the real world, there are other things you must deal with also: getting automated reports to higher-level management, based on god knows what source of data, development time, processing various data in various situations, generating weekly graphs without pointing-and-clicking your way through Excel every friday. Those of us who use Perl have programs doing our jobs for us, doing all these things, and anything you can imagine pertaining to unix administration.
Perl can also be used to develop big projects, rapidly, and cheaply. Programming Perl is said to be one of the most popular books in the semiconductor industry. If you use linux or use the internet, you're using Perl at one point or another, i could go on, but won't.
Absolutely, and the mixture was actually comprised of both aluminum powder and iron oxide, the same basic combination in solid rocket fuel.
There was something on PBS recently about this, and the theory is that a static spark ignited the doped fabric when the lines touched ground.
Researchers conducted a test with an actual scrap from the Hindenberg's doped canvas skin and it went up in a flash when exposed to a spark. According to the show, records revealed that the Hindenberg's manufacturer had secretly conducted such expirements back in the day, and had reached the same conclusion.
Though hydrogen fueled the fire, the researchers said they believe this is what started it in the first place.
OK, but that's not the point. The point is we're entering into a cultural battle between the old-line politicos, old-money and anyone who fully understands that the Athlon box on their desk can do a lot of things that a state-sanctioned entertainment device, such as a television, cannot.
Increasingly, the answer of the old boys network that runs America is to use the court system they run to throw tech professionals in jail, for trivial offenses. While you may not post DeCSS, other legitimate things you do in the course of sysadmin, security audits, app development, whatever, are increasingly going to be bordering on civil and *criminal* offenses.
Look at the Khafka-esque persecution of Skylarov, Randall L. Schwartz and others. This is the Spanish Inquisition, USA circa 2001. This is getting to be like McCarthism, and rapidly so. How about that dude in Georgia who is facing 20 years for using spare cycles to crunch numbers in a university lab?
If you are hanging out on slashdot, you may know enough to be a "suspect." Just being here may make you a suspect. Suspect of what? In this era, it doesn't seem much to matter.
"a planet with over five hundred TV channels and a trillion Web pages."
Ahh, Harvard, the Stanford of the East. These academics need to get off the dole and work for a living.
Seriously, how much information is really being broadcast on these "500 channels" and how small a handful of megacorps own them. We know its all just infomercials anyways.
And the news ("information") these days is weaker than ever. Larry King interviewing that retard Jon Stewart like he was the other night isn't news. Stone Phillips talking to cancer victims and crime victims isn't news either. Tune into the state-sancitoned media conglomerates and show me some real "information." Good luck. You'll see a bunch of sappy human interest stories, complete with cheeseball soundtrack and video effects.
Its all propaganda to keep the eyeballs in place, nothing more, nothing less.
Though this is one minor victory, the gist of the CNET article is simple, and we've know it for a while: big business is going to send in the lawyers to squelch free speech, and it is usually going to win. After all, the mainstream media has already been bought out. And the average idiot on AOL is not a threat, so the *sucks\.[org|net|com] crowd is on the most wanted list.
Saying "McDonalds sucks" or "GM sucks" is free speech. That's all there is to it. And all this talk about extortion and why or why not someone owns a domain is nonsense. If these corporate retards had understood the internet instead of just spending the late 80s/early 90s getting drunk at the golf course, this wouldn't be an issue in the first place.
GM/Disney/AOLTW/Fox aka Murdock now control the media. The last vestige of free speech is the net, which is exactly the reason it is under attack. Its kind of shocking to read wishy-washy posts on this issue on slashdot. Imagine if this site were moderated by AOL or MSN.
Damian Conway's book blows away the others in its explanations of OO in Perl, and OO in general. If you're a Perl programmer, it is a must read. Especially, if you want to develop serious applications.
IMHO, this is no AI just a simple perl script, probably no more than a 100 lines. The napster protocol is widely available, but the info they have gleaned is almost certainly useless: a lot of usernames and floating IPs. This is an old gag in the net business. old-line companies have enough trouble just getting on the net. what perl can do will more than baffle them. The NetPD crew is probably laughing their asses off to the tune of search_and_destroy.mp3. As for Lars and the boys, its kind of sad. I own every CD, have 'kill em all, 'master' and 'lightning' on vinyl and have seen the band at least 6 times. I'm still a fan, but you guys should have let N Sync or some other cheesy boy band spawn this controversy.
Slashdot Mirror
So, you know why perl sucks, but you don't know enough to have any samples handy other than one you say is from an O'Rielly book: as others have noted, it won't compile, but that's not even the point.
Perl has more than its share of haters, but look at what is built in perl: banking systems, systems used in genomics, on Wall Street, those automated Amazon warehouses, this discussion board where those who don't know Perl declare boldly that it is useless.
The language is widely used by engineers in various industries to solve all sorts of problems that have nothing to do with CGI or servlets and which have no need for the do-it-yourself memory management of C or the strict object structure of Java.
The Homer Simpson reaction is commonplace, wherein newbies look at a section of perl code and declare it to be "hard to read" or whatnot. Perl is extremely easy to read if coded by someone who cares about such things. Perl is difficult to learn, but learning it unlocks the real power.
C is never easy to read. And as for Python, its a cool language, but where is the CPAN? the vaults of parnyssus is much less organized and mature than CPAN, and there's way too much 0.01 releases. Python is perl with better object structure, no CPAN and no curly brackets. Its biggest problem is that Perl was first, and many of us will continue to use perl.
The CPAN note is an especially important one here in the real world: You can get a CPAN module that will assist in pretty much any IT-related task you could think of.
In the real world, there are other things you must deal with also: getting automated reports to higher-level management, based on god knows what source of data, development time, processing various data in various situations, generating weekly graphs without pointing-and-clicking your way through Excel every friday. Those of us who use Perl have programs doing our jobs for us, doing all these things, and anything you can imagine pertaining to unix administration.
Perl can also be used to develop big projects, rapidly, and cheaply. Programming Perl is said to be one of the most popular books in the semiconductor industry. If you use linux or use the internet, you're using Perl at one point or another, i could go on, but won't.
There was something on PBS recently about this, and the theory is that a static spark ignited the doped fabric when the lines touched ground.
Researchers conducted a test with an actual scrap from the Hindenberg's doped canvas skin and it went up in a flash when exposed to a spark. According to the show, records revealed that the Hindenberg's manufacturer had secretly conducted such expirements back in the day, and had reached the same conclusion.
Though hydrogen fueled the fire, the researchers said they believe this is what started it in the first place.
Increasingly, the answer of the old boys network that runs America is to use the court system they run to throw tech professionals in jail, for trivial offenses. While you may not post DeCSS, other legitimate things you do in the course of sysadmin, security audits, app development, whatever, are increasingly going to be bordering on civil and *criminal* offenses.
Look at the Khafka-esque persecution of Skylarov, Randall L. Schwartz and others. This is the Spanish Inquisition, USA circa 2001. This is getting to be like McCarthism, and rapidly so. How about that dude in Georgia who is facing 20 years for using spare cycles to crunch numbers in a university lab?
If you are hanging out on slashdot, you may know enough to be a "suspect." Just being here may make you a suspect. Suspect of what? In this era, it doesn't seem much to matter.
Ahh, Harvard, the Stanford of the East. These academics need to get off the dole and work for a living.
Seriously, how much information is really being broadcast on these "500 channels" and how small a handful of megacorps own them. We know its all just infomercials anyways.
And the news ("information") these days is weaker than ever. Larry King interviewing that retard Jon Stewart like he was the other night isn't news. Stone Phillips talking to cancer victims and crime victims isn't news either. Tune into the state-sancitoned media conglomerates and show me some real "information." Good luck. You'll see a bunch of sappy human interest stories, complete with cheeseball soundtrack and video effects.
Its all propaganda to keep the eyeballs in place, nothing more, nothing less.
Saying "McDonalds sucks" or "GM sucks" is free speech. That's all there is to it. And all this talk about extortion and why or why not someone owns a domain is nonsense. If these corporate retards had understood the internet instead of just spending the late 80s/early 90s getting drunk at the golf course, this wouldn't be an issue in the first place.
GM/Disney/AOLTW/Fox aka Murdock now control the media. The last vestige of free speech is the net, which is exactly the reason it is under attack. Its kind of shocking to read wishy-washy posts on this issue on slashdot. Imagine if this site were moderated by AOL or MSN.
ps, *nix rules, microsoftsucks.com
Damian Conway's book blows away the others in its explanations of OO in Perl, and OO in general. If you're a Perl programmer, it is a must read. Especially, if you want to develop serious applications.
IMHO, this is no AI just a simple perl script, probably no more than a 100 lines. The napster protocol is widely available, but the info they have gleaned is almost certainly useless: a lot of usernames and floating IPs. This is an old gag in the net business. old-line companies have enough trouble just getting on the net. what perl can do will more than baffle them. The NetPD crew is probably laughing their asses off to the tune of search_and_destroy.mp3. As for Lars and the boys, its kind of sad. I own every CD, have 'kill em all, 'master' and 'lightning' on vinyl and have seen the band at least 6 times. I'm still a fan, but you guys should have let N Sync or some other cheesy boy band spawn this controversy.