But rewriting from scratch, the developers here now already know more about Perl. You cannot take people out of the equation.
And maybe PHP is similar to C, but so is Perl. And far more people know Perl than PHP. So I don't see how you could say more people can follow PHP than Perl. If you are talking about ugly, poorly written Perl, then I suppose more people could good PHP than ugly Perl. And more people could follow good Perl than ugly PHP. And more people could folllow good Perl than good PHP, since few people know PHP, compared to those that know Perl.
Honestly, are you just fishing for someone to say that PHP is clearly, without a doubt, a better choice for such a project? It is not going to happen from any reasonable person. And it is not going to be the case that a reasonable person is going to say that Perl is clearly, without a doubt, a better choice. Many factors come into it. In this case, Perl is the better choice because of many factors, some of which have to do with the language, some of which have to do with the people involved. Get different people, and you might get a different answer. And in the end, if you can get the job done, then why does it matter?
Well, they didn't exactly get swapped. From what I understand (and this stuff all predates me), Plain Text was always designed to process HTML tags, but it would add in stuff like
tags for you atuomatically. Perhaps it is ill-named, but oh well.:-)
Exttrans was designed to take its place; it prints what you put in there, after "fixing" your < and > and & to be < and > and &.
I added a special "Slashdot" bug group on SourceForge yesterday, so you can submit your Slashdot bugs in the same place, but tag them as specific to Slashdot if you like.
And yeah, I suppose this should be somewhere on the site in a FAQ or something. I just mentioned it to CowboyNeal.
Yeah, which is why I pointed you over to SourceForge to look for yourself.:-) Although, I should add that if it is working on Slashdot, then yes, it is most likely on SourceForge, since no change gets to Slashdot code (unless someone is Bad) without going through CVS on SourceForge.
But for your amusement, I went over myself to find it. Look here.
I don't know enough about mysql and other databases to know if something else would be better. That said, I am impressed with mysql, and my only significant problem with it for Slashdot is lack of replication, which is being developed now.
I would absolutely not go to PHP, basically because I love Perl and don't like PHP.
Would PHP increase development speed? No. I am very fast at developing with Perl, and I don't see how developing in another language would be faster. Even if I could learn PHP real well, I would still be as fast or faster in Perl. For other people, it might increase development speed, I dunno. Not for me, certainly.
Would PHP be able to keep up with traffic? Probably, as much as Perl can.
Would PHP be faster than Perl? Of course not.
Would PHP require less memory than Perl? I don't know. I've heard it would.
Would PHP make it more maintanable and expandable by other people? If those people knew PHP better than Perl, yes. If they knew Perl better than PHP, no. "Maintainability" is a function of good programming practices, not language. My Perl programs and modules are far more maintainable than a lot of C, C++, Python, and PHP code out there. And there are far less maintainable than others of the same languages. The language is mostly irrelevant in this respect.
And in that line of thought, objectively speaking, it is a clear fact that moving to PHP would make Slash less maintainable, since the developers working on the project know and like Perl a lot better.
This stupid PHP advocacy is about as useful and as interesting as BSD vs. Linux. If you like PHP, use it. I don't give a damn. But don't try to make me feel silly or stupid or wrong for using Perl, just so you can feel better about your personal decision to use PHP. It won't work. I am proud to use Perl, and love it, and the best emotion you can get out of me is pity, not because you are using a language I feel to be less useful and interesting and mature, but because you have little better to do with your time.
Do NOT send it to CmdrTaco. Or me, or CowboyNeal, or CaptTofu. Use SourceForge for bugs and patches and feature requests.
As to us "not knowing SQL" (I am not sure if that is tongue-in-cheek or not), well, all I can say is that there is a lot of really old code in there. Sure, you are going to see a lot of cruft. We're working hard on rewriting major portions of the thing. You may see some code in there that does nothing at all, or does nothing useful, or does something bad. All I can say to that is "duh." Send a patch or a bug report if you like, we will certainly appreciate it.
But don't bother pointing out that, gasp, bugs and bad code are in Slash. That's a given. That's why we are working so hard on it and devoting so many resources to it (four full-time developers, IIRC, not including CmdrTaco, plus several more, like Cliff, who are splitting time with Slash and other projects). The code was pretty good for what it was, but over time it got crufty, and now we are going back and fixing it. That's how these things work.
The bug where you can't meta-moderate because it thinks you've recently meta-moderated even though you've never meta-moderated? Yeah, should be fixed now. Check the CHANGES file, and look in the code if you like. But since you can meta-moderate, I guess that answers your question anyway.:-)
XHTML is basically supported now by any browser supporting the latest HTML specs. I mean, not perfectly perhaps, but then again, what browser supports HTML perfectly?:-)
A republic -- as we know it in America -- is not the same as a democracy. But let's assume they are. So what? You still the responsibility, as a citizen, to keep yourself free. You have the responsibility to keep your family free. You have the responsibility to keep your family safe. No one else has these responsibilities. Only you do.
I think the other poster was trying to make the point that in a "modern" society we have nothing to fear. You even say we have nothing to fear. I am not sure how someone could think that. I don't know how someone can look at the various corrupt governments in the world, including the US, and say "I trust this goverment to protect my liberties. I trust that this government will never attempt to take away my liberties."
As to corporations, what power do they have over me? None at all. Like a government, they have only what power we give them or allow them to take. Except with corporations, this is even more the case. A bank only has power because I choose to do business with it. An OS maker in Redmond or Cupertino only has power because I use their software, willingly. I can choose to close my accounts and turn off my computers any time I want to, and their power over me disappears.
And you know, I am sick of replying to ACs. I am not going to do it anymore. This is the last time.
Note, "leaders" that emerged from otherwise political turmoil - not elected leaders in modern democracies. In case you've forgotten, most people consider the U.S. a modern democracy.
I fail to see -- and I doubt you could tell me -- what modern has to do with anything. As to being a democracy, well, no, the U.S. is not a democracy, modern or otherwise, it is a republic. And even if it were a democracy, I fail to see how that would be relevant.
So your list of "bad guys" are all from countries other than the U.S., but your list of "good guys" are all from the country where it is every citizen's right to bear a thermonuclear device as a deterrant against home invasion?
Since my list also included a Brit and an Brit/Indian, and since no country grants the right above, I don't suppose I'll respond to that entirely fallacious question, which doesn't seem to even ask for an answer anyway.
``Nonviolence and cowardice go ill together. I can imagine a fully armed man to be at heart a coward. Possession of arms implies an element of fear, if not cowardice. But true nonviolence is an impossibility withought the possession of unadulterated fearlessness.'' - Mohandas K. Gandhi, 1939
He also said this: "Among the many misdeeds of the British rule in India, history will look upon the act of depriving a whole nation of arms, as the blackest." -- Mohandas Gandhi
He recognized that regardless of his feelings of nonviolence, that for the government to strip away the right to arms was a horrible evil.
In other words, to pursue a path a nonviolence involves courage - but to resort to the use of firearms involves fear and cowardice.
Fear, sure. I fear the government. So? Doesn't everyone fear the U.S. government, when it has proven to be so immensely corrupt and untrustworthy?
Yes, the NRA wants you to be fearful.
Non sequitur. I don't care what they want.
You're a coward by your own admission, by agreeing with Gandhi.
Gandhi did not say possession of arms is a show of cowardice. He said he can imagine a "fully armed" man to be a coward (whatever "fully armed" means), but not that he necessarily is. He said possession of arms implies fear, "if not cowardice." He is not saying it implies cowardice, but that it _could_ imply cowardice. Certainly, the people who have fought and died for freedom were not cowards. They were exactly the opposite. They were fearful, of course. But there's nothing wrong with fear.
Heck, there is no need to even state a need for nonviolence without the same kind of fear that drives men to be armed.
One last note: I am not the one with "coward" in my name...
Sigh. In our world's history, it is always the fascist dictators who wanted to remove guns, and the democratic heads of state who wanted to keep them. Mao, Hitler, Lenin, Stalin, all hated people having guns. Madsion, Adams, Jefferson, Hamilton, etc. all wanted people to have them. Don't forget Orwell and Ghandi. People who have loved freedom saw the necessity of the people having guns. You are free to disagree, but don't frame it as though we are nuts because we agree with Ghandi and Madison and disagree with Mao and Lenin (and you).
I am not falling prey to the genetic fallacy here. I just think your post lacks historical perspective, so I am offering some.
And while you are comparing crime rates, look at Switzerland, where everyone has a gun and there are very few crimes. As Heinlein said, an armed society is a polite society.:-)
Mark, I dig VA and Source Forge, but I gotta tell ya, I don't understand your concern. You write:
A proprietary third party could, however, take the code, make improvements to the code, and put up a competing site using the improvements. Nothing in the GPL would compel them to release the improvements.
My question is: so what? Let them. Encourage them. I admit I am no businessman. I am just a lowly little Andover.Net programmer who not only has no business aspirations whatsoever, but actually dislikes business. I don't believe in marketing (it is just a figment of our collective imagination) and I think business plans are silly. So perhaps my words ring hollow.
But I don't say what I say out of a lack of understanding of business or a zealousness for free software. I just don't think it matters much. What is really the worst that could happen here? Nothing of significance.
Good question. There are a couple of issues. First, some of our boxes cannot be in a pool; not all of our boxes are web boxes.:-) Second, we will have a whole bunch of just general purpose web boxes waiting to be used by various sites, not just Slashdot. So we may have six web boxes in the Slashdot pool, and 10 sitting there twiddling their thumbs, and if two go down for Slashdot, we bring in two more; if two go down for some other site, we can use those, etc.
Eh. References are complicated, but if you read MJD's perlreftut manpage (he is the one who wrote the sins of perl article you reference), they can be pretty easy, I think. They are also very powerful. Also consider that almost all beginners don't need to use them for anything.
If it is plain text, then, according to the accepted definitions of "plain" and "text" (and "old"), one would think that there would be no bold or "other formatting stuff" included, wouldn't you think?
Slashdot Mirror
But rewriting from scratch, the developers here now already know more about Perl. You cannot take people out of the equation.
And maybe PHP is similar to C, but so is Perl. And far more people know Perl than PHP. So I don't see how you could say more people can follow PHP than Perl. If you are talking about ugly, poorly written Perl, then I suppose more people could good PHP than ugly Perl. And more people could follow good Perl than ugly PHP. And more people could folllow good Perl than good PHP, since few people know PHP, compared to those that know Perl.
Honestly, are you just fishing for someone to say that PHP is clearly, without a doubt, a better choice for such a project? It is not going to happen from any reasonable person. And it is not going to be the case that a reasonable person is going to say that Perl is clearly, without a doubt, a better choice. Many factors come into it. In this case, Perl is the better choice because of many factors, some of which have to do with the language, some of which have to do with the people involved. Get different people, and you might get a different answer. And in the end, if you can get the job done, then why does it matter?
tags for you atuomatically. Perhaps it is ill-named, but oh well. :-)
Exttrans was designed to take its place; it prints what you put in there, after "fixing" your < and > and & to be < and > and &.
I added a special "Slashdot" bug group on SourceForge yesterday, so you can submit your Slashdot bugs in the same place, but tag them as specific to Slashdot if you like.
And yeah, I suppose this should be somewhere on the site in a FAQ or something. I just mentioned it to CowboyNeal.
Yeah, which is why I pointed you over to SourceForge to look for yourself. :-) Although, I should add that if it is working on Slashdot, then yes, it is most likely on SourceForge, since no change gets to Slashdot code (unless someone is Bad) without going through CVS on SourceForge.
But for your amusement, I went over myself to find it. Look here.
I don't know enough about mysql and other databases to know if something else would be better. That said, I am impressed with mysql, and my only significant problem with it for Slashdot is lack of replication, which is being developed now.
I would absolutely not go to PHP, basically because I love Perl and don't like PHP.
Would PHP increase development speed? No. I am very fast at developing with Perl, and I don't see how developing in another language would be faster. Even if I could learn PHP real well, I would still be as fast or faster in Perl. For other people, it might increase development speed, I dunno. Not for me, certainly.
Would PHP be able to keep up with traffic? Probably, as much as Perl can.
Would PHP be faster than Perl? Of course not.
Would PHP require less memory than Perl? I don't know. I've heard it would.
Would PHP make it more maintanable and expandable by other people? If those people knew PHP better than Perl, yes. If they knew Perl better than PHP, no. "Maintainability" is a function of good programming practices, not language. My Perl programs and modules are far more maintainable than a lot of C, C++, Python, and PHP code out there. And there are far less maintainable than others of the same languages. The language is mostly irrelevant in this respect.
And in that line of thought, objectively speaking, it is a clear fact that moving to PHP would make Slash less maintainable, since the developers working on the project know and like Perl a lot better.
This stupid PHP advocacy is about as useful and as interesting as BSD vs. Linux. If you like PHP, use it. I don't give a damn. But don't try to make me feel silly or stupid or wrong for using Perl, just so you can feel better about your personal decision to use PHP. It won't work. I am proud to use Perl, and love it, and the best emotion you can get out of me is pity, not because you are using a language I feel to be less useful and interesting and mature, but because you have little better to do with your time.
As to us "not knowing SQL" (I am not sure if that is tongue-in-cheek or not), well, all I can say is that there is a lot of really old code in there. Sure, you are going to see a lot of cruft. We're working hard on rewriting major portions of the thing. You may see some code in there that does nothing at all, or does nothing useful, or does something bad. All I can say to that is "duh." Send a patch or a bug report if you like, we will certainly appreciate it.
But don't bother pointing out that, gasp, bugs and bad code are in Slash. That's a given. That's why we are working so hard on it and devoting so many resources to it (four full-time developers, IIRC, not including CmdrTaco, plus several more, like Cliff, who are splitting time with Slash and other projects). The code was pretty good for what it was, but over time it got crufty, and now we are going back and fixing it. That's how these things work.
The bug where you can't meta-moderate because it thinks you've recently meta-moderated even though you've never meta-moderated? Yeah, should be fixed now. Check the CHANGES file, and look in the code if you like. But since you can meta-moderate, I guess that answers your question anyway. :-)
XHTML is basically supported now by any browser supporting the latest HTML specs. I mean, not perfectly perhaps, but then again, what browser supports HTML perfectly? :-)
Anyone who knows anything about CGI security knows that checking referers is pretty much a waste of time, if you want to really fix a problem.
You could, you know, tell us when you find a hole, so we could, you know, plug it up and stuff.
Hemos, we are sending bug reports to SourceForge now. Leave Pater alone. ;-)
A republic -- as we know it in America -- is not the same as a democracy. But let's assume they are. So what? You still the responsibility, as a citizen, to keep yourself free. You have the responsibility to keep your family free. You have the responsibility to keep your family safe. No one else has these responsibilities. Only you do.
I think the other poster was trying to make the point that in a "modern" society we have nothing to fear. You even say we have nothing to fear. I am not sure how someone could think that. I don't know how someone can look at the various corrupt governments in the world, including the US, and say "I trust this goverment to protect my liberties. I trust that this government will never attempt to take away my liberties."
As to corporations, what power do they have over me? None at all. Like a government, they have only what power we give them or allow them to take. Except with corporations, this is even more the case. A bank only has power because I choose to do business with it. An OS maker in Redmond or Cupertino only has power because I use their software, willingly. I can choose to close my accounts and turn off my computers any time I want to, and their power over me disappears.
And you know, I am sick of replying to ACs. I am not going to do it anymore. This is the last time.
Note, "leaders" that emerged from otherwise political turmoil - not elected leaders in modern democracies. In case you've forgotten, most people consider the U.S. a modern democracy.
I fail to see -- and I doubt you could tell me -- what modern has to do with anything. As to being a democracy, well, no, the U.S. is not a democracy, modern or otherwise, it is a republic. And even if it were a democracy, I fail to see how that would be relevant.
So your list of "bad guys" are all from countries other than the U.S., but your list of "good guys" are all from the country where it is every citizen's right to bear a thermonuclear device as a deterrant against home invasion?
Since my list also included a Brit and an Brit/Indian, and since no country grants the right above, I don't suppose I'll respond to that entirely fallacious question, which doesn't seem to even ask for an answer anyway.
``Nonviolence and cowardice go ill together. I can imagine a fully armed man to be at heart a coward. Possession of arms implies an element of fear, if not cowardice. But true nonviolence is an impossibility withought the possession of unadulterated fearlessness.'' - Mohandas K. Gandhi, 1939
He also said this: "Among the many misdeeds of the British rule in India, history will look upon the act of depriving a whole nation of arms, as the blackest." -- Mohandas Gandhi
He recognized that regardless of his feelings of nonviolence, that for the government to strip away the right to arms was a horrible evil.
In other words, to pursue a path a nonviolence involves courage - but to resort to the use of firearms involves fear and cowardice.
Fear, sure. I fear the government. So? Doesn't everyone fear the U.S. government, when it has proven to be so immensely corrupt and untrustworthy?
Yes, the NRA wants you to be fearful.
Non sequitur. I don't care what they want.
You're a coward by your own admission, by agreeing with Gandhi.
Gandhi did not say possession of arms is a show of cowardice. He said he can imagine a "fully armed" man to be a coward (whatever "fully armed" means), but not that he necessarily is. He said possession of arms implies fear, "if not cowardice." He is not saying it implies cowardice, but that it _could_ imply cowardice. Certainly, the people who have fought and died for freedom were not cowards. They were exactly the opposite. They were fearful, of course. But there's nothing wrong with fear.
Heck, there is no need to even state a need for nonviolence without the same kind of fear that drives men to be armed.
One last note: I am not the one with "coward" in my name ...
Sigh. In our world's history, it is always the fascist dictators who wanted to remove guns, and the democratic heads of state who wanted to keep them. Mao, Hitler, Lenin, Stalin, all hated people having guns. Madsion, Adams, Jefferson, Hamilton, etc. all wanted people to have them. Don't forget Orwell and Ghandi. People who have loved freedom saw the necessity of the people having guns. You are free to disagree, but don't frame it as though we are nuts because we agree with Ghandi and Madison and disagree with Mao and Lenin (and you).
:-)
I am not falling prey to the genetic fallacy here. I just think your post lacks historical perspective, so I am offering some.
And while you are comparing crime rates, look at Switzerland, where everyone has a gun and there are very few crimes. As Heinlein said, an armed society is a polite society.
Exactly.
Yes, it is.
A proprietary third party could, however, take the code, make improvements to the code, and put up
a competing site using the improvements. Nothing in the GPL would compel them to release the improvements.
My question is: so what? Let them. Encourage them. I admit I am no businessman. I am just a lowly little Andover.Net programmer who not only has no business aspirations whatsoever, but actually dislikes business. I don't believe in marketing (it is just a figment of our collective imagination) and I think business plans are silly. So perhaps my words ring hollow.
But I don't say what I say out of a lack of understanding of business or a zealousness for free software. I just don't think it matters much. What is really the worst that could happen here? Nothing of significance.
Actually, we announced our use of Source Forge when we first announced the beta servers a couple of weeks ago. :-)
Good question. There are a couple of issues. First, some of our boxes cannot be in a pool; not all of our boxes are web boxes. :-) Second, we will have a whole bunch of just general purpose web boxes waiting to be used by various sites, not just Slashdot. So we may have six web boxes in the Slashdot pool, and 10 sitting there twiddling their thumbs, and if two go down for Slashdot, we bring in two more; if two go down for some other site, we can use those, etc.
Creating a new usable class is a hassle?
package My::Class;
sub new { bless {}, __PACKAGE__ }
All done! What else do you want? How about an accessor?
sub foo {
my $self = shift;
$self->{FOO} = shift if @_;
return $self->{FOO};
}
Now we use it:
my $obj = new My::Class;
$obj->foo('bar');
print $obj->foo;
It doesn't seem that hard to me.
It has been down some. It is beta. We will bring things up and down with some regularity while we are tuning and testing and finding bugs. Thanks. :)
Hey freak, that has nothing to do witht he fact that it is in Perl. It was a logic error. I know, because I made it. So blame me, not Perl.
Eh. References are complicated, but if you read MJD's perlreftut manpage (he is the one who wrote the sins of perl article you reference), they can be pretty easy, I think. They are also very powerful. Also consider that almost all beginners don't need to use them for anything.
If it is plain text, then, according to the accepted definitions of "plain" and "text" (and "old"), one would think that there would be no bold or "other formatting stuff" included, wouldn't you think?
Extrans was broken before. It is now working properly. Now it appears plain text is broken. Sigh. On the TODO list. :-)