As one used to say, a little knowledge is a dangerous thing, so this argument isn't really convincing.
I've worked for people in the past who knew a little basic and then believed that they knew how some large, multi-tiered thing could be re-architected in a few lines, as in a Hollywood film [or Dilbert].
A little technical knowledge [rather than just knowing buzzwords, another common trap] may at least help filter some of the more hopeless potential 'programmers' for your project but it needs to be combined with a healthy dose of reality and knowing ones limits: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dunning%E2%80%93Kruger_effect
Happy Birthday Perl: Some Personal Thoughts
on
Perl Turns 25
·
· Score: 1
Happy Birthday Perl. I'm 62 and have been using it as my main language since about 1995.
Actually, because it's linguistics based, rather than elegant computer science, DWIM [do what I mean] and TIMTOWTDI [there's more than one way to do it] it always feels very natural.
Also, although I agree its confusing sometimes [lots of sigils, autovivification zombie horror etc.] it's also very very expressive. Try COBOL, try Java and try APL if you want highly expressive but incomprehensible minimalism [and find a new keyboard].
Finally, as at least one poster has already said, CPAN gives nearly any project in Perl a running/sprinting start.
Yes, so agree with this. Most of my Linux computers are from about 2003 -2005, a couple of them are 365/24 servers [so infrequent boots, fair enough] but everything boots just fine. The only Windows in da house now is for test installs etc. I don't actually USE it for anything much.
I agree the law has to change, unhappily that's slow. Boycott meanwhile though and it does work in many case. And, yes, 'everyone does it' is the downside of fiduciary duty an idea whose time has surely passed in its undiluted form.
Actually, there's a very sensible approach to this, somewhat started in the UK already. We, as citizens, decide that we dislike this kind of behaviour and we boycott the worst 'offenders'. As an old-skool Brit, I'm a tea drinker anyway, there's nothing that I like in Starbucks and I dislike the appalling value for money too.
There's a genuine problem here in that a) it's their fiduciary duty of corporations to maximise profit at all costs, to hell with social infrastructure, the environment and other minor details so this is one of the results b) in the UK the so-called Tax Code runs to about 10K pages of useless complexity, so there's always a decent sized hole somewhere c) If the holes aren't closed everywhere, there'll usually be a new opportunity or place to do this, it's called fiscal dumping.
Finally some socially aware sharefolder activism would help, in some of these cases, but since shareholders are usually large investment funds and insurance companies, there's no pressure from there either. So consumer boycott and sustained negative commentary is a good start, then profits decrease and shareholders begin to wake up and take a mild interest.
Meraki is mesh wifi that grew out of Roofnet: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roofnet. They sold 'open source' oriented mesh hardware for a while and then closed the infrastructure and raised prices. Declaration of interest, I got caught and remain mad with them, they're a good example of [what I call] 'open season', jackals who scavange on open-source. Here's some of the detail: http://www.dslreports.com/shownews/Meraki-Annoys-Partners-Customers-88249
Since there's been news of predatory and exaggerated pricing by Cisco recently: http://slashdot.org/index2.pl?fhfilter=cisco+pricing they'll make great partners. I'm not taking anything at all from either of them.
Yes, I'm a person that believes that we should try not to damage our biosphere 'anyway' because clearly there are enough of us involved in polluting activities to unbalance it. Therefore we should tread as lightly as possible, this is a matter of respect and an aesthetic matter as well as a matter of scientific precaution. Also climate change is probably going to bring extremes rather than 'global warming' but since we don't really know, it's better not to mess around with it, in so far as it's not too late.
That said, I agree there are very few experts, many campaigners and shills and one 'head of comedy' involved, part of the decline of science and rigour in the BBC. I grew up watching Tomorrow's World and the Open University programmes and I'm saddened by its fall. Obviously that 'fact' will help campaigners for polluting companies make their case, an additional cause for regret.
That used to be Arthur Andersen. I first 'met' them in about 1975 when they were messing up something in Woolworths UK. Since then they've been involved in messing up a great many things in gov.uk and some of our bigger companies. I'm not sure what their record is like elsewhere. Also, remember they 'audited' Enron, hence the name change. So, I don't expect that much from this, either way. $3 million they'll be through that in a couple of days, too...
Well done, I'm carrying on too, as someone said, it's like an interesting puzzle. Yes, I probably wrote a Fortran program to calculate pi in 1966 when at school, we took it to a mainframe at a steel mill to run it. 50 years old, just youngsters, bah!
Nope, I'm 62, there have been a lot of threads about this recently [or maybe I'm reading the same thread time and again? nooooo] and I get quite a lot of work. I'm contract and I've never been that interested in salaried work. As I'm mainly a Perl person who works on large codebases, I'm in a good legacy niche.
But I keep up with stuff, svn and now git, Ruby as it's related to Perl, Erlang because it's interesting, PHP because half the open-source-web is coded in it [ugh], not-Java though I could probably make money out of it. As many people have posted, I've been doing all this for about 36-odd years and I like it, how lucky is that?
I agree that bad code is the norm. My recent experience was a large Perl codebase, belonging to the merger of about four different companies that did the same thing but [of course] had different business processes. The code was in the gigbyte range with tons of templates and about four foreign lanugage versions.
However the code base covered many corner cases in the business model, pricing and marketing and [in the main] worked.
The least-worst way is rolling reviews through sections of the system and a very comprehensive set of regression tests. But the point is that, at some stage, one will have to engage with 'bad code that works', it's the way of the world.
Mod this up to the skies, please! In my opinion this applies to -everything- forgotten books [I've been thinking about trying to find the rights owners for some of them], forgotten music [same problem, I'm from the 60s there's some wonderful stuff buried] etc. Unhappily, for me, this non-publishing is collateral damage that [in the spirit of Bentham: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jeremy_Bentham%5D should be increasing the sum total of human happiness and instead lies locked or buried.
The second point, for software etc., is the 'standing on the shoulders of giants' idea. That is, something fairly simple or a few bits can be used to build something spectacular or inspire it. Same point of inspiration idea for music too.
Great post with a great many 'extra' implications, thank you.
Yes, we find this really hard to understand. Why should any human be financially ruined for the 'crime' of being ill? That said, we're now moving into the epoch where people really do need to take more responsibility for 'lifestyle' problems. I gave up smoking, I still run and I prepare most of my food, grill and steam, no packet meals, I'm 'selfish' enough to want some quality of life as I get older.
Sorry about the heading, some of you will know the quote though. I've argued about the UK and Europe because I'm a Brit.
But most people want policies or sets of policies rather than particular people. Some of that is driven by idealism, some by self-interest and more usually by mixtures of the two.
However the candidates don't usually map to the policies and so, in the centre, quite justifiably, one wants a slice of both candidates. Also, of course, in this scenario, some policies are interlocking. Public healthcare will require taxation to support it, for example, it can't just be conjured. So some set sets of policies are desirable but self-contradictory [although less so than the system would have it, there should be no 'deep' poverty in the UK, for example, it's not third-world].
Finally, politicians often don't deliver their policies because of a) outside constraints, I'm sure the current UK government would prefer to spend more currently, for example b) public servants who pursue their own agendas and block anything that requires effort [think Sir Humphrey but real-life, I worked for the EEC for quite a while] c) influential lobbying, this is something that we probably can start to make more transparent and eliminate, but to get back to OP, it means removing a lot of the money-focus from modern electoral systems.
Yes, agree, I'm 61 in the UK and make good money from Perl. I'm freelance and I keep up with it [Catalyst, Mojolicious, Class:DBIx etc]. It's a great niche to be in. Besides I really -like- Perl. Yes there's plenty of C# and Java but they usually ask for experience, thus you're in the trap of 'no experience without job' and 'no job without experience'.
Incidentally at 61 I don't think anyone would want me for a permanent job, but I prefer freelance and [frankly] permanent job security is pretty bad anyway.
Nope, didn't know they had one...I don't remember the exact year I was over there but probably 1965 -1966. We were kids from Oundle, so probably the ICL 1900 was the easiest thing for us to use. Thanks, must get to museum at Bletchley sometime soon, heard a realy enthusiastic and inspiring talk from one of the staff, very recently...
Code up Fortran programme with a loop to calculate pi on coding sheets. Take it over to Corby [UK] Stewart and Lloyds, a steel mill [when we still had them] which had an ICL 1901 or 1902 with a huge drum store. Get the program punched up on paper tape and let it loop for a while, printing out iterations on a huge line printer.
Building sets of NORs into a half-adder using discrete PNP [I think..] transistors. Ruining shirts with Ferric Chloride used to etch the primitive circuits.
I was very priviledged and very lucky, posh school interested in technical things. Been interested ever since.
Why only last night, but it was really dark and I was pretty wasted. I'm ashamed to tell you the rest. I think the scratches are going to heal pretty well though.
So agree, I'm 62 in a couple of weeks. I'm mainly a Perl person, been somewhat in love with it since about 1995, but in that time, I've done a part-time MSc with a Java project at its core and, apart from programming, some consultancy and project work. I'm currently doing some work for a university in Europe right now involving Perl, Java and some messy SOAP calls [they should be clean shoudn't they?!].
There are a ton of things that I'm interested in too, big data, sensors, 3d printing and some of the newer languages like Lua and Ruby and some of the unusual ones like Erlang.
I think the key is also further up the thread, IT is somewhat vocational, the best ones [I don't necessairly include myself] are not usually in it just for career/money. Hey, they like it!
Sniff! I had my hopes up. But, actually, if the box is airtight, then we can deduce [after a short while] that the cat is dead without looking or without the weak quantumy torch. Actually I wonder if the content of all these deductions are producing some effects, maybe they are information.
I think I'll go to bed now, it's been a long day at the very coalface of advanced science. I really liked that cat too.
Slashdot Mirror
As one used to say, a little knowledge is a dangerous thing, so this argument isn't really convincing.
I've worked for people in the past who knew a little basic and then believed that they knew how some large, multi-tiered thing could be re-architected in a few lines, as in a Hollywood film [or Dilbert].
A little technical knowledge [rather than just knowing buzzwords, another common trap] may at least help filter some of the more hopeless potential 'programmers' for your project but it needs to be combined with a healthy dose of reality and knowing ones limits: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dunning%E2%80%93Kruger_effect
Or the Godwhale: http://www.sfsignal.com/archives/2005/02/review_the_godwhale_by_tj_bass/ why don't they just build that? Looks like fun to me...
Happy Birthday Perl. I'm 62 and have been using it as my main language since about 1995.
Actually, because it's linguistics based, rather than elegant computer science, DWIM [do what I mean] and TIMTOWTDI [there's more than one way to do it] it always feels very natural.
Also, although I agree its confusing sometimes [lots of sigils, autovivification zombie horror etc.] it's also very very expressive. Try COBOL, try Java and try APL if you want highly expressive but incomprehensible minimalism [and find a new keyboard].
Finally, as at least one poster has already said, CPAN gives nearly any project in Perl a running/sprinting start.
But I bet Amazon are jealous of that highly advanced method...
Yes, so agree with this. Most of my Linux computers are from about 2003 -2005, a couple of them are 365/24 servers [so infrequent boots, fair enough] but everything boots just fine. The only Windows in da house now is for test installs etc. I don't actually USE it for anything much.
http://www.professorbainbridge.com/professorbainbridgecom/2012/05/case-law-on-the-fiduciary-duty-of-directors-to-maximize-the-wealth-of-corporate-shareholders.html for example, it isn't a theory.
Also, a charity is not a for-profit structure, it's not the same as a for-profit corporation. You seem a little confused, I hope it works out for you.
I agree the law has to change, unhappily that's slow. Boycott meanwhile though and it does work in many case. And, yes, 'everyone does it' is the downside of fiduciary duty an idea whose time has surely passed in its undiluted form.
Actually, there's a very sensible approach to this, somewhat started in the UK already. We, as citizens, decide that we dislike this kind of behaviour and we boycott the worst 'offenders'. As an old-skool Brit, I'm a tea drinker anyway, there's nothing that I like in Starbucks and I dislike the appalling value for money too.
There's a genuine problem here in that a) it's their fiduciary duty of corporations to maximise profit at all costs, to hell with social infrastructure, the environment and other minor details so this is one of the results b) in the UK the so-called Tax Code runs to about 10K pages of useless complexity, so there's always a decent sized hole somewhere c) If the holes aren't closed everywhere, there'll usually be a new opportunity or place to do this, it's called fiscal dumping.
Finally some socially aware sharefolder activism would help, in some of these cases, but since shareholders are usually large investment funds and insurance companies, there's no pressure from there either. So consumer boycott and sustained negative commentary is a good start, then profits decrease and shareholders begin to wake up and take a mild interest.
Meraki is mesh wifi that grew out of Roofnet: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roofnet. They sold 'open source' oriented mesh hardware for a while and then closed the infrastructure and raised prices. Declaration of interest, I got caught and remain mad with them, they're a good example of [what I call] 'open season', jackals who scavange on open-source. Here's some of the detail: http://www.dslreports.com/shownews/Meraki-Annoys-Partners-Customers-88249
Since there's been news of predatory and exaggerated pricing by Cisco recently: http://slashdot.org/index2.pl?fhfilter=cisco+pricing they'll make great partners. I'm not taking anything at all from either of them.
Yes, I'm a person that believes that we should try not to damage our biosphere 'anyway' because clearly there are enough of us involved in polluting activities to unbalance it. Therefore we should tread as lightly as possible, this is a matter of respect and an aesthetic matter as well as a matter of scientific precaution. Also climate change is probably going to bring extremes rather than 'global warming' but since we don't really know, it's better not to mess around with it, in so far as it's not too late.
That said, I agree there are very few experts, many campaigners and shills and one 'head of comedy' involved, part of the decline of science and rigour in the BBC. I grew up watching Tomorrow's World and the Open University programmes and I'm saddened by its fall. Obviously that 'fact' will help campaigners for polluting companies make their case, an additional cause for regret.
Yes, of course if when you say 'coffee' you mean 'shirt', they're pretty much the same.
That used to be Arthur Andersen. I first 'met' them in about 1975 when they were messing up something in Woolworths UK. Since then they've been involved in messing up a great many things in gov.uk and some of our bigger companies. I'm not sure what their record is like elsewhere. Also, remember they 'audited' Enron, hence the name change. So, I don't expect that much from this, either way. $3 million they'll be through that in a couple of days, too...
Bah, new fangled screens and stuff, never catch on, the only real way is a manual card punch: http://www.computerhistory.org/collections/accession/X1271.96
Well done, I'm carrying on too, as someone said, it's like an interesting puzzle. Yes, I probably wrote a Fortran program to calculate pi in 1966 when at school, we took it to a mainframe at a steel mill to run it. 50 years old, just youngsters, bah!
Nope, I'm 62, there have been a lot of threads about this recently [or maybe I'm reading the same thread time and again? nooooo] and I get quite a lot of work. I'm contract and I've never been that interested in salaried work. As I'm mainly a Perl person who works on large codebases, I'm in a good legacy niche.
But I keep up with stuff, svn and now git, Ruby as it's related to Perl, Erlang because it's interesting, PHP because half the open-source-web is coded in it [ugh], not-Java though I could probably make money out of it. As many people have posted, I've been doing all this for about 36-odd years and I like it, how lucky is that?
I agree that bad code is the norm. My recent experience was a large Perl codebase, belonging to the merger of about four different companies that did the same thing but [of course] had different business processes. The code was in the gigbyte range with tons of templates and about four foreign lanugage versions.
However the code base covered many corner cases in the business model, pricing and marketing and [in the main] worked.
Thirty odd years of experience has shown me that a re-write of something like this is usually a disaster, I agree with Joel: http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/fog0000000069.html
The least-worst way is rolling reviews through sections of the system and a very comprehensive set of regression tests. But the point is that, at some stage, one will have to engage with 'bad code that works', it's the way of the world.
Mod this up to the skies, please! In my opinion this applies to -everything- forgotten books [I've been thinking about trying to find the rights owners for some of them], forgotten music [same problem, I'm from the 60s there's some wonderful stuff buried] etc. Unhappily, for me, this non-publishing is collateral damage that [in the spirit of Bentham: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jeremy_Bentham%5D should be increasing the sum total of human happiness and instead lies locked or buried.
The second point, for software etc., is the 'standing on the shoulders of giants' idea. That is, something fairly simple or a few bits can be used to build something spectacular or inspire it. Same point of inspiration idea for music too.
Great post with a great many 'extra' implications, thank you.
Yes, we find this really hard to understand. Why should any human be financially ruined for the 'crime' of being ill? That said, we're now moving into the epoch where people really do need to take more responsibility for 'lifestyle' problems. I gave up smoking, I still run and I prepare most of my food, grill and steam, no packet meals, I'm 'selfish' enough to want some quality of life as I get older.
Sorry about the heading, some of you will know the quote though. I've argued about the UK and Europe because I'm a Brit.
But most people want policies or sets of policies rather than particular people. Some of that is driven by idealism, some by self-interest and more usually by mixtures of the two.
However the candidates don't usually map to the policies and so, in the centre, quite justifiably, one wants a slice of both candidates. Also, of course, in this scenario, some policies are interlocking. Public healthcare will require taxation to support it, for example, it can't just be conjured. So some set sets of policies are desirable but self-contradictory [although less so than the system would have it, there should be no 'deep' poverty in the UK, for example, it's not third-world].
Finally, politicians often don't deliver their policies because of a) outside constraints, I'm sure the current UK government would prefer to spend more currently, for example b) public servants who pursue their own agendas and block anything that requires effort [think Sir Humphrey but real-life, I worked for the EEC for quite a while] c) influential lobbying, this is something that we probably can start to make more transparent and eliminate, but to get back to OP, it means removing a lot of the money-focus from modern electoral systems.
So [my opinion] there's not just one problem and the amalgam makes a wicked problem: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wicked_problem
Yes, agree, I'm 61 in the UK and make good money from Perl. I'm freelance and I keep up with it [Catalyst, Mojolicious, Class:DBIx etc]. It's a great niche to be in. Besides I really -like- Perl. Yes there's plenty of C# and Java but they usually ask for experience, thus you're in the trap of 'no experience without job' and 'no job without experience'.
Incidentally at 61 I don't think anyone would want me for a permanent job, but I prefer freelance and [frankly] permanent job security is pretty bad anyway.
Good luck and may the force be with you!
Nope, didn't know they had one...I don't remember the exact year I was over there but probably 1965 -1966. We were kids from Oundle, so probably the ICL 1900 was the easiest thing for us to use. Thanks, must get to museum at Bletchley sometime soon, heard a realy enthusiastic and inspiring talk from one of the staff, very recently...
Code up Fortran programme with a loop to calculate pi on coding sheets. Take it over to Corby [UK] Stewart and Lloyds, a steel mill [when we still had them] which had an ICL 1901 or 1902 with a huge drum store. Get the program punched up on paper tape and let it loop for a while, printing out iterations on a huge line printer.
Building sets of NORs into a half-adder using discrete PNP [I think..] transistors. Ruining shirts with Ferric Chloride used to etch the primitive circuits.
I was very priviledged and very lucky, posh school interested in technical things. Been interested ever since.
Why only last night, but it was really dark and I was pretty wasted. I'm ashamed to tell you the rest. I think the scratches are going to heal pretty well though.
So agree, I'm 62 in a couple of weeks. I'm mainly a Perl person, been somewhat in love with it since about 1995, but in that time, I've done a part-time MSc with a Java project at its core and, apart from programming, some consultancy and project work. I'm currently doing some work for a university in Europe right now involving Perl, Java and some messy SOAP calls [they should be clean shoudn't they?!].
There are a ton of things that I'm interested in too, big data, sensors, 3d printing and some of the newer languages like Lua and Ruby and some of the unusual ones like Erlang.
I think the key is also further up the thread, IT is somewhat vocational, the best ones [I don't necessairly include myself] are not usually in it just for career/money. Hey, they like it!
Sniff! I had my hopes up. But, actually, if the box is airtight, then we can deduce [after a short while] that the cat is dead without looking or without the weak quantumy torch. Actually I wonder if the content of all these deductions are producing some effects, maybe they are information.
I think I'll go to bed now, it's been a long day at the very coalface of advanced science. I really liked that cat too.