i'm not sure if they're allergic to talking to each other, at least at the level of people that are actually doing something with the language, instead of yelling "my dad is bigger than your dad" from the top of two equally high piles of mud. both camps seem interested in the possibilities of a vm that will handle both languages. (as a user, i certainly am). larry and guido take occasional shots at each other's creation, but it seems pretty good natured. if i recall, larry even mentioned a couple of python features he liked in one of his apocalypses. (could be wrong - no time to check).
i started with perl, love the language and have no plans on giving it up, but i've been looking at python, and i can see myself using both. i don't see the problem with that.
unfortunately, both languages have a lot of users that are ill-behaved children.
this was definitely the best shower i've ever seen...i've been catching at least the perseids every year for the last couple decades, and i've never seen anything like this. even though i was watching from a farmer's field fairly close to a large city (Edmonton, AB - and, yeah, it's not that big, but it's too damned bright), at the peak you could see really bright ones every couple seconds. brilliant colours, sudden bursts of five or six. hands down the coolest was the one that blew up. never seen anything like it.
really cool was getting to share it with my best friend's kid, though. i was about her age when i got hooked. it's good to be able to pass the torch.
rambling on...i've also never seen so many people out watching before. it gave me a warm fuzzy feeling, seeing so many people actually interested in what was going on up there.
I'm not so annoyed by the need to blame (hey, if someone steals my credit info and causes me ten kinds of hassle I WANT somebody to blame) as the stupid assignment of blame, which I'm tempted to say is a side-effect of our litigation-crazy culture...
fair enough, and that's an important distinction - i'm getting my rants crossed (god knows, i've got enough of them).
i agree, rampant litigation is a key problem, and the way all that litigation is rewarded - there's no incentive not to sue someone, and you might get a buck out of it. it's probably also fair to say that we're generally not trained to think deeply about a problem. that is, we follow something to it's first possible solution point (in this case, google) and then stop.
at the rate we're going, we'll be knee deep in the bodies of messengers in no time.
Considering the pace at which we are forced to invent and deploy to drive capitalism, these types of situations should be considered the cost of doing business the way it's currently done.
very interesting point...consumer demand (and the way that demand is enshrined in law, for example, the obligation of public traded companies to do their best to maximize shareholder profit) really is driving us down a very dangerous path. It's not so much the unfettered advance of technology, but the way that advances are demanded and regulated by those with, at best, a shallow understanding of the technology itself.
inevitably, this leads to poor implementation and poor laws to govern our shiny creations. and when the Bad Thing happens, fingers are pointed at the creators, and legislators are looked to for salvation.
(insert rant here about our blame oriented culture...)
But other critics said Google bears its share of the blame.
"We have a problem, and that is that people don't design software to behave itself," said Gary McGraw, chief technology officer of software risk-management company Cigital, and author of a new book on writing secure software.
also known as ostrich security...if you're s00p3r s3cr37 files are just lying around waiting for idle surfers, search engines are the least of your worries. if you don't know enough to protect your files (by, say, not linking to them, or.htaccess files, or encrypting them), it's not the search engines fault. it's you're own dumb ass.
this guy's just looking for free hype for his book. if that's the kind of advice he offers, he's doing more harm than good.
This reminds me of a story Richard Feynman tells in Surely You're Joking, Mr. Feynman about when he was working at Los Alamos. It was a sensitive project, and there were security flaws; insecure locks, people not locking up their research, a hole in the fence.When he pointed them out, he was generally ignored, and told to get back to work. So he took to pointing them out in funny, difficult to ignore ways. Retrieving people's notes for them when they were at meetings, walking circles around the guards (going out the approved, gated way, coming back in through a hole in the fence), until something was done about them.
Point is, people responsible for security don't like being told they've made a mistake, and sometimes you've got to make sure they can't just tell you to sit down and shut up, whether in the real or virtual world.
Companies like MS want to keep security issues out of the public eye because it's cheaper and easier to sell the public on features than it is on security. Their motivation is marketability and sales. So if secure software is important, we've got to make sure security issues have lots of exposure. It's the only way to motivate them.
going to sacrifice a couple karma points by going wildly off topic, but this is something that's been bugging me lately - the continual bitching when the occasional article gets rerun. (please note, i am not accusing the parent poster of this. that was just a helpful link for those that weren't reading the science section).
newspapers rerun stories all the time. the news networks are 90% recycled, content free info. as a general rule,/. does a pretty fine job of delivering up spanking fresh content, filtered for interest, packaged and delivered free (free, goddamnit!) to my desktop.
it wasn't that many years ago when i had to make do with the anemic science and technology section of the daily rag.
ah, thank you. i think about The Wonderful Flight to the Mushroom Planet once in a while, but could never remember the name or author. It was definitely one the books that kicked off my love of science fiction.
Seriously, Perl is a two dollar whore when it comes to syntax, but that's a good reason to keep coming back.
heh. That's one of the funniest descriptions I've heard of perl yet.
I love perl too (and I'm anxiously looking forward to Perl 6, which will hopefully have some of those shiny OO enhancements I've been craving. Alot of my scripts end up in that paradigm, and I'd love a few of the things mentioned in Apocalypse 2).
I've started picking up python finally, mostly because of jython. I'm planning on moving to JSP and servlets for web development, and the thought of being able to prototype quickly in python, and have two languages to choose from depending on need is awful appealing. More, I have a lot more confidence in training people in a bit of python than a bit of java, if need be.
That said, I don't think I'll be giving up perl anytime soon. It's a powerful language, and I like how obvious it is that it was developed by a linguist. It maps well to my brain. You can do amazing things with perl, in a very short development cycle, and with a bit of discipline, produce code every bit as maintainable as any other language. (sloppy perl coders have just been giving the rest of us a bad name).
To be honest, the biggest reason I haven't picked up python sooner is the rabid python evangelists. God, they're annoying. It's a language, not the holy grail. Get some perspective.
Conclusion? Different tools. I'm glad there's python. I'm glad there's perl. One's not going to be suddenly displaced by the other. I sort of think of python as the brazen adolescent, trying to figure out where it fits in, and pushing at it's elders. It will settle down, and be useful for a long time to come, I'm sure.
That was a bit of a rant, but I feel much better getting it off my chest.
Great. Now instead of getting legislators to understand privacy issues directly, we just need to get them to read. Seems that if more of them did the latter, the former would be less of a problem in the first place.
sigh. I wish this wasn't true. I was talking with a friend today, who was saying that their company had hired some agency or another to implement online ordering for them. The first words out of my mouth were "We'll have to talk to your boss in four months after they've realized the consultants screwed up."
It was just a gut reaction, but knowing the other agencies in the area, there's a 95% chance that it's true. No one in our geographical locale know how to do this well. They're typically high priced agencies with glossy campaigns that cater to the oh-it's-online-it's-sexy mentalitly that I'm hoping this dot-com crisis finally kills.
Sorry, just ranting because we've had to deal too much with customers that were burned by high-price consultants and aren't willing to shell out for quality work anymore. And I wish that wasn't an understandable attitude.
People who tend to screw over their employers, often find them selves without a job.
What's more, the only employers/clients you'll have will be the dumb ones. God (insert agnostic subsititue here) knows, you don't want that.
I try to provide the best solution to our clients, period. There's always other factors - cost, time - that frequently get in the way of what's best, but that's life in our hyper-net-time world.
On the other hand, I admittedly don't always provide as good service to blatantly stupid clients. I don't mean the ones that don't know my business - that's why I'm being hired. I mean the one's that don't know better than to let me do my job. I'm a consultant - theoretically, I'm working for you because I know what I'm doing. Too often, I seem to be working to rubber stamp some PHB's ideas. That's when my quality filters degrade. You get the consultant you deserve.
heh. The way my manager speaks, you'd think coding was like talking to the computer on Star Trek. I mean, it can't be that much work, you use a computer for it right?
Perl was what dragged me into this (through the back door of web development -> CGI -> hey, could you write something to do this for us?) in the first place. It was my introduction to linux, and to programming in general. And the first lessons I learned were 1) once you learn one language, you've got the basic way of thinking, and 2) you will learn more about system A by studying system B than if you just stayed with A your whole life. Whether you're talking about languages, operating systems or cooking, learn more than one way to do it.
I've wandered far enough off topic here. It just feels good to hear someone else with the same sentiments.
I'm glad to hear somebody finally say this. I'm new at this programming thing, but I get really tired of people ranting about the wonderful things they can do with their whiz-snappy, wizard-based proprietary IDE. And it being completely obvious that if you take away their comfy drag-and-drop interface and pre-written code that they wouldn't know where to start. pfft. I get along fine with emacs and a few term windows, thank you very much.
Don't get me wrong - I'm not denigrating the usefullness of IDEs. If you like working with them, more power to you. But knowing how to use one and knowing how to Program are not the same things. Knowing the former will make you better at using the latter, I suppose, but the reverse can't be said.
Pardon my ranting...it's just nice to hear a voice of reason. (Can you tell I'm frustrated by people callling themselves programmers 'cause they've been working on VB apps in Access?)
Re:but you couldn't transport it
on
Stop, Light.
·
· Score: 2
I'm from Canada, and one of my coworkers is a lawyer (one of the good ones - that's why she decided she didn't want to practice anymore), and the company we're in tried for non-compete clauses in our contracts which basically said if we leave the company, we can't do anything remotely like what we're doing now for one year.
She wasn't worried about it. According to her, an employment contract can't interfere with your right to make a living. I'm a web developer, and not being allowed to do that for one year would be an unreasonable burden.
The Perl Journal has been an invaluable resource and learning tool for me for years. Thanks, Jon, for doing such a stand up job as editor, and to the many contributors and staff that have made it something I'd be heart-broken to see vanish. It's the one magazine I never miss.
Hear, hear. And let me add another point from the article that most seemed to miss. I'm seeing a lot of criticism about there not being a "killer-app", or about there not being a good way to search, or about it not having X feature that's already supplied elsewhere.
People, this is a platform. Freenet will supply a method of doing things. We haven't seen anything that will be done with this yet. The internet didn't spring to life fully formed with eBay, Yahoo, Google, Slashdot, etc. and we're still exploring what can be done with it. Freenet's no different. Right now it's a pre-beta project with some good ideas built into it. There's no way we can see yet what will be done with it.
So chill out. If you can contribute code, do so. If you can think of ways the protocol can be exploited, talk about them. If the best you can come up with is "Napster already does this", please, shut the hell up, because you obviously don't understand what it's about.
I'm not sure if this'll lure me away from *cough*emacs*cough* for coding perl, but there's a few features I'm looking forward to checking out.
Primary among them the regex debugger. There are too many days when all I do is write regular expressions, and trying to find that one misplaced slash after staring at them for ten hours can be a real bitch. Anything that makes that easier will make me happy.
I'm also looking forward to javascript support in it. Having one place to code, test and debug that nonsense will be a godsend. Just being able to examine variables with something besides alert() will wonderful. Debugging javascript gives me the shakes.
On a somewhat related note, does anyone know if cperl-mode in emacs has syntax folding? I'd swear I'd heard something about it somewhere, but if it's there, I haven't found it.
Slashdot Mirror
i'm not sure if they're allergic to talking to each other, at least at the level of people that are actually doing something with the language, instead of yelling "my dad is bigger than your dad" from the top of two equally high piles of mud. both camps seem interested in the possibilities of a vm that will handle both languages. (as a user, i certainly am). larry and guido take occasional shots at each other's creation, but it seems pretty good natured. if i recall, larry even mentioned a couple of python features he liked in one of his apocalypses. (could be wrong - no time to check).
i started with perl, love the language and have no plans on giving it up, but i've been looking at python, and i can see myself using both. i don't see the problem with that.
unfortunately, both languages have a lot of users that are ill-behaved children.
this was definitely the best shower i've ever seen...i've been catching at least the perseids every year for the last couple decades, and i've never seen anything like this. even though i was watching from a farmer's field fairly close to a large city (Edmonton, AB - and, yeah, it's not that big, but it's too damned bright), at the peak you could see really bright ones every couple seconds. brilliant colours, sudden bursts of five or six. hands down the coolest was the one that blew up. never seen anything like it.
really cool was getting to share it with my best friend's kid, though. i was about her age when i got hooked. it's good to be able to pass the torch.
rambling on...i've also never seen so many people out watching before. it gave me a warm fuzzy feeling, seeing so many people actually interested in what was going on up there.
i knew it had something to do with elves.
and people said i was loony...
fair enough, and that's an important distinction - i'm getting my rants crossed (god knows, i've got enough of them).
i agree, rampant litigation is a key problem, and the way all that litigation is rewarded - there's no incentive not to sue someone, and you might get a buck out of it. it's probably also fair to say that we're generally not trained to think deeply about a problem. that is, we follow something to it's first possible solution point (in this case, google) and then stop.
at the rate we're going, we'll be knee deep in the bodies of messengers in no time.
very interesting point...consumer demand (and the way that demand is enshrined in law, for example, the obligation of public traded companies to do their best to maximize shareholder profit) really is driving us down a very dangerous path. It's not so much the unfettered advance of technology, but the way that advances are demanded and regulated by those with, at best, a shallow understanding of the technology itself.
inevitably, this leads to poor implementation and poor laws to govern our shiny creations. and when the Bad Thing happens, fingers are pointed at the creators, and legislators are looked to for salvation.
(insert rant here about our blame oriented culture...)
madness
this guy's just looking for free hype for his book. if that's the kind of advice he offers, he's doing more harm than good.
This reminds me of a story Richard Feynman tells in Surely You're Joking, Mr. Feynman about when he was working at Los Alamos. It was a sensitive project, and there were security flaws; insecure locks, people not locking up their research, a hole in the fence.When he pointed them out, he was generally ignored, and told to get back to work. So he took to pointing them out in funny, difficult to ignore ways. Retrieving people's notes for them when they were at meetings, walking circles around the guards (going out the approved, gated way, coming back in through a hole in the fence), until something was done about them.
Point is, people responsible for security don't like being told they've made a mistake, and sometimes you've got to make sure they can't just tell you to sit down and shut up, whether in the real or virtual world.
Companies like MS want to keep security issues out of the public eye because it's cheaper and easier to sell the public on features than it is on security. Their motivation is marketability and sales. So if secure software is important, we've got to make sure security issues have lots of exposure. It's the only way to motivate them.
going to sacrifice a couple karma points by going wildly off topic, but this is something that's been bugging me lately - the continual bitching when the occasional article gets rerun. (please note, i am not accusing the parent poster of this. that was just a helpful link for those that weren't reading the science section).
newspapers rerun stories all the time. the news networks are 90% recycled, content free info. as a general rule, /. does a pretty fine job of delivering up spanking fresh content, filtered for interest, packaged and delivered free (free, goddamnit!) to my desktop.
it wasn't that many years ago when i had to make do with the anemic science and technology section of the daily rag.
damn. i feel better. thanks /.
FWIW, i think this is the ASP tool you're talking about.
i've never used it, but others have told me it's fab. Alternatives, woohoo!
...as in Ayn? Seems an appropriate name.
was that supposed to be modded insightful or funny? it's getting hard to tell around here...
although, i'm sure i read that one of the first signs of a serial killer is the torture of small instruction sets.
no, really.
ah, thank you. i think about The Wonderful Flight to the Mushroom Planet once in a while, but could never remember the name or author. It was definitely one the books that kicked off my love of science fiction.
The basis of all truly cool technology is the recalibration of shield harmonics. Without that, Trek is nothing.
oh, wait...
heh. That's one of the funniest descriptions I've heard of perl yet.
I love perl too (and I'm anxiously looking forward to Perl 6, which will hopefully have some of those shiny OO enhancements I've been craving. Alot of my scripts end up in that paradigm, and I'd love a few of the things mentioned in Apocalypse 2).I've started picking up python finally, mostly because of jython. I'm planning on moving to JSP and servlets for web development, and the thought of being able to prototype quickly in python, and have two languages to choose from depending on need is awful appealing. More, I have a lot more confidence in training people in a bit of python than a bit of java, if need be.
That said, I don't think I'll be giving up perl anytime soon. It's a powerful language, and I like how obvious it is that it was developed by a linguist. It maps well to my brain. You can do amazing things with perl, in a very short development cycle, and with a bit of discipline, produce code every bit as maintainable as any other language. (sloppy perl coders have just been giving the rest of us a bad name).
To be honest, the biggest reason I haven't picked up python sooner is the rabid python evangelists. God, they're annoying. It's a language, not the holy grail. Get some perspective.
Conclusion? Different tools. I'm glad there's python. I'm glad there's perl. One's not going to be suddenly displaced by the other. I sort of think of python as the brazen adolescent, trying to figure out where it fits in, and pushing at it's elders. It will settle down, and be useful for a long time to come, I'm sure.
That was a bit of a rant, but I feel much better getting it off my chest.
- eddy
I like the sort fix, too. Bumped into that bug just last week...thought I'd blown a synapse.
(Yet Another Catch-22)
Great. Now instead of getting legislators to understand privacy issues directly, we just need to get them to read. Seems that if more of them did the latter, the former would be less of a problem in the first place.
sigh. I wish this wasn't true. I was talking with a friend today, who was saying that their company had hired some agency or another to implement online ordering for them. The first words out of my mouth were "We'll have to talk to your boss in four months after they've realized the consultants screwed up."
It was just a gut reaction, but knowing the other agencies in the area, there's a 95% chance that it's true. No one in our geographical locale know how to do this well. They're typically high priced agencies with glossy campaigns that cater to the oh-it's-online-it's-sexy mentalitly that I'm hoping this dot-com crisis finally kills.
Sorry, just ranting because we've had to deal too much with customers that were burned by high-price consultants and aren't willing to shell out for quality work anymore. And I wish that wasn't an understandable attitude.
What's more, the only employers/clients you'll have will be the dumb ones. God (insert agnostic subsititue here) knows, you don't want that.
I try to provide the best solution to our clients, period. There's always other factors - cost, time - that frequently get in the way of what's best, but that's life in our hyper-net-time world.
On the other hand, I admittedly don't always provide as good service to blatantly stupid clients. I don't mean the ones that don't know my business - that's why I'm being hired. I mean the one's that don't know better than to let me do my job. I'm a consultant - theoretically, I'm working for you because I know what I'm doing. Too often, I seem to be working to rubber stamp some PHB's ideas. That's when my quality filters degrade. You get the consultant you deserve.
heh. The way my manager speaks, you'd think coding was like talking to the computer on Star Trek. I mean, it can't be that much work, you use a computer for it right?
Perl was what dragged me into this (through the back door of web development -> CGI -> hey, could you write something to do this for us?) in the first place. It was my introduction to linux, and to programming in general. And the first lessons I learned were 1) once you learn one language, you've got the basic way of thinking, and 2) you will learn more about system A by studying system B than if you just stayed with A your whole life. Whether you're talking about languages, operating systems or cooking, learn more than one way to do it.
I've wandered far enough off topic here. It just feels good to hear someone else with the same sentiments.
I'm glad to hear somebody finally say this. I'm new at this programming thing, but I get really tired of people ranting about the wonderful things they can do with their whiz-snappy, wizard-based proprietary IDE. And it being completely obvious that if you take away their comfy drag-and-drop interface and pre-written code that they wouldn't know where to start. pfft. I get along fine with emacs and a few term windows, thank you very much.
Don't get me wrong - I'm not denigrating the usefullness of IDEs. If you like working with them, more power to you. But knowing how to use one and knowing how to Program are not the same things. Knowing the former will make you better at using the latter, I suppose, but the reverse can't be said.
Pardon my ranting...it's just nice to hear a voice of reason. (Can you tell I'm frustrated by people callling themselves programmers 'cause they've been working on VB apps in Access?)
How would you transport you hologram?
Personally, I'd use a small, beeping robot.
I'm from Canada, and one of my coworkers is a lawyer (one of the good ones - that's why she decided she didn't want to practice anymore), and the company we're in tried for non-compete clauses in our contracts which basically said if we leave the company, we can't do anything remotely like what we're doing now for one year.
She wasn't worried about it. According to her, an employment contract can't interfere with your right to make a living. I'm a web developer, and not being allowed to do that for one year would be an unreasonable burden.
Still haven't signed the contract, though...
The Perl Journal has been an invaluable resource and learning tool for me for years. Thanks, Jon, for doing such a stand up job as editor, and to the many contributors and staff that have made it something I'd be heart-broken to see vanish. It's the one magazine I never miss.
Good luck, and I hope this all comes out ok...
Hear, hear. And let me add another point from the article that most seemed to miss. I'm seeing a lot of criticism about there not being a "killer-app", or about there not being a good way to search, or about it not having X feature that's already supplied elsewhere.
People, this is a platform. Freenet will supply a method of doing things. We haven't seen anything that will be done with this yet. The internet didn't spring to life fully formed with eBay, Yahoo, Google, Slashdot, etc. and we're still exploring what can be done with it. Freenet's no different. Right now it's a pre-beta project with some good ideas built into it. There's no way we can see yet what will be done with it.
So chill out. If you can contribute code, do so. If you can think of ways the protocol can be exploited, talk about them. If the best you can come up with is "Napster already does this", please, shut the hell up, because you obviously don't understand what it's about.
I'm not sure if this'll lure me away from *cough*emacs*cough* for coding perl, but there's a few features I'm looking forward to checking out.
Primary among them the regex debugger. There are too many days when all I do is write regular expressions, and trying to find that one misplaced slash after staring at them for ten hours can be a real bitch. Anything that makes that easier will make me happy.
I'm also looking forward to javascript support in it. Having one place to code, test and debug that nonsense will be a godsend. Just being able to examine variables with something besides alert() will wonderful. Debugging javascript gives me the shakes.
On a somewhat related note, does anyone know if cperl-mode in emacs has syntax folding? I'd swear I'd heard something about it somewhere, but if it's there, I haven't found it.