Yup and the same for many text mangling tasks involving a regex. The typical unix pipeline tools used to outperform perl for this stuff but now perl often greps faster than grep.
"Perl should be used like awk: only for short scripts, preferably things that fit on the command line. As soon as a perl (or awk) scripts exceeds 99 lines, it should probably be rewritten..."
Any particular reason why? Well written modern Perl is fast, clean, time tested, reliable, and easy to write. Is there some reason you should avoid it?
"I thought Perl was C with nicer data types, or bash with nicer conditionals"
That's cool but if you implement execution and control structures the same way in Perl that you do in C they aren't going to give very good performance. You don't want to be spending much time monkeying with arrays in Perl for example.
"To do it well, it does require learning Perl from a Perl-perspective."
Absolutely. Actually that is one of Perl's weaknesses in my mind because you can do most things in a C like way and the end result will be functional but slow code. This leads many programmers who feel that you should be able to pick up any language in a day if you know how to program to think they know Perl and know that Perl is slow.
First Perl isn't declining in popularity, it just isn't growing. It is PERCEIVED to be declining but that has been the case for years. If anything I'm seeing more interest in Perl. I know I've seen more Perl related Slashdot stories in the past couple months than in the last few years.
I'm curious what exactly you would replace Perl with? PHP? Only if you wrongly thought Perl was about web stuff. Python? ewww.. that's disgusting!
"Most modern languages have caught up to Perl5 in terms of basic regex power"
Most modern languages implement a Perl Compatible Regular Expression engine and have most (but not all) of the features but certainly not in terms of speed.
I'm not saying GM foods are harmful but it is quite likely dangers would be missed. It happens constantly. The pharmaceutical industry produces substances that prove to be very harmful all the time.
Because Monsanto has a much bigger lobby than you. This would hurt their profits and they have an easy case to make. There is widespread fear and paranoia about GMO foods but there simply isn't any rational basis for it. So why wouldn't officials take their bribe money?
Me either. I'm opposed to companies buying out seed outlets and replacing seed that produces viable offspring only with seed that can't reproduce. There is nothing about a GMO plant that says the seed can't be viable or requires the producer to deliberate engage in the genocide of seed lines that produce viable offspring.
Monsanto buys out any source of seed that can grow plants which produce viable seed in turn and replaces it with seed that can't reproduce. They are engaging in the mass genocide of food sources. What more evil do you need? Polluting and dumping is bad but isn't even worth making a discussion point when talking about the evil of Monsanto.
If civilization (or Monsanto) collapses tomorrow do you think you'll be able to grow any corn from the plants left in the hundreds of acres of corn growing near you? Think again. It dies completely in one generation. The food production of entire nations locked into Monsanto's grip.
Is there really a need for a citation supporting the idea that humans have died sampling unknown plants/insects/animals as food sources through trial and error over the course of the evolutionary existence of the species? Or that the results of interbreeding haven't always resulted in viable offspring?
Millions seems like a fairly conservative guesstimate to me.
"During that time we've eaten just about everything, interbread just about every plant and animal we could, promptly eating anything that resulted."
That's all well and good for the human race but that process didn't exactly work out for all the individuals who did the eating or were offspring of the breeding.
The office upgrade was part of the Munich upgrade. They were upgrading both office suite and OS. Since the OSS solution gives them the latest version of the comparable suite it has to be compared with upgrading to the latest and greatest MS Office.
"Delays it indefinitely. I consider that removing it."
Good for you. A cost that can be foreseen today and is guaranteed to come down the road isn't removed. It's just a fudged statistic.
"Or are you asserting that we must cost all future upgrades into a present upgrade?"
Absolutely. At least the costs that are predictable within the anticipated lifespan of the solution you are upgrading to. It wouldn't be a very accurate savings assessment if you didn't consider the costs of future upgrades that you offset by switching to a platform that doesn't deliberately force you to upgrade or charge for the upgraded software. You also have to consider the costs as if you were upgrading the day of release since your OSS typically stays up to the minute unless you've intentionally chosen to prevent it. So if you estimate your open solution will remain installed and up to date for 7 years and you expect the commercial solutions would have pushed 3 upgrades to stay with the latest stuff in that time you need the cost of those upgrades must be considered as part of the cost of using the commercial solution for this upgrade because they would be saved with the open solution.
"So they disabled alt-tab and the windows key changed functionality? "
A typical desktop user wouldn't be using either one. The GUI changed, the browser interface changed, the office interface completely changed. Setting the system to XP mode doesn't remove the cost of retraining it just delays it.
"What's the cost to train for Windows when everyone knows Windows?"
Knowing the current version is not the same as knowing the new version. For a desktop user switching to Vista from WinXP was as big a change as switching to Linux.
Exactly. Whatever metrics they used here are now proven to be bogus metrics. Undoubtedly they are using the same methodology to reach bogus value assessments now. They don't want people to be able to point out the method is provably invalid.
Slashdot Mirror
Yup and the same for many text mangling tasks involving a regex. The typical unix pipeline tools used to outperform perl for this stuff but now perl often greps faster than grep.
" I remember writing a Perl script that had to do some kind of diff between two files and wondering why the following line failed"
That would be a reflection on your lack of knowing Perl and not a reflection on the language.
"Perl should be used like awk: only for short scripts, preferably things that fit on the command line. As soon as a perl (or awk) scripts exceeds 99 lines, it should probably be rewritten..."
Any particular reason why? Well written modern Perl is fast, clean, time tested, reliable, and easy to write. Is there some reason you should avoid it?
"For custom application or other mostly larger system Java-based or .NET-based technologies are used."
Perl is actually still used extensively in this space.
"As the Unix command shell is only a limited realm (in number of installations)"
Yeah, hardly any *nix deployments in the world. Sounds like you work in an isolated area of the market filled with windows shops.
You can write darn near anything in anything. But there aren't many problems that Python is well suited to that Perl isn't better suited to.
"I thought Perl was C with nicer data types, or bash with nicer conditionals"
That's cool but if you implement execution and control structures the same way in Perl that you do in C they aren't going to give very good performance. You don't want to be spending much time monkeying with arrays in Perl for example.
"To do it well, it does require learning Perl from a Perl-perspective."
Absolutely. Actually that is one of Perl's weaknesses in my mind because you can do most things in a C like way and the end result will be functional but slow code. This leads many programmers who feel that you should be able to pick up any language in a day if you know how to program to think they know Perl and know that Perl is slow.
That and Perl isn't really a web programming language.
You seem to have this odd idea that Perl is a web related language.
First Perl isn't declining in popularity, it just isn't growing. It is PERCEIVED to be declining but that has been the case for years. If anything I'm seeing more interest in Perl. I know I've seen more Perl related Slashdot stories in the past couple months than in the last few years.
I'm curious what exactly you would replace Perl with? PHP? Only if you wrongly thought Perl was about web stuff. Python? ewww.. that's disgusting!
"Most modern languages have caught up to Perl5 in terms of basic regex power"
Most modern languages implement a Perl Compatible Regular Expression engine and have most (but not all) of the features but certainly not in terms of speed.
Unless they are Antiguan...
I'm not saying GM foods are harmful but it is quite likely dangers would be missed. It happens constantly. The pharmaceutical industry produces substances that prove to be very harmful all the time.
"why not mandate labelling GMO foods"
Because Monsanto has a much bigger lobby than you. This would hurt their profits and they have an easy case to make. There is widespread fear and paranoia about GMO foods but there simply isn't any rational basis for it. So why wouldn't officials take their bribe money?
"I'm not opposed to GMOs"
Me either. I'm opposed to companies buying out seed outlets and replacing seed that produces viable offspring only with seed that can't reproduce. There is nothing about a GMO plant that says the seed can't be viable or requires the producer to deliberate engage in the genocide of seed lines that produce viable offspring.
Monsanto buys out any source of seed that can grow plants which produce viable seed in turn and replaces it with seed that can't reproduce. They are engaging in the mass genocide of food sources. What more evil do you need? Polluting and dumping is bad but isn't even worth making a discussion point when talking about the evil of Monsanto.
If civilization (or Monsanto) collapses tomorrow do you think you'll be able to grow any corn from the plants left in the hundreds of acres of corn growing near you? Think again. It dies completely in one generation. The food production of entire nations locked into Monsanto's grip.
Is there really a need for a citation supporting the idea that humans have died sampling unknown plants/insects/animals as food sources through trial and error over the course of the evolutionary existence of the species? Or that the results of interbreeding haven't always resulted in viable offspring?
Millions seems like a fairly conservative guesstimate to me.
"During that time we've eaten just about everything, interbread just about every plant and animal we could, promptly eating anything that resulted."
That's all well and good for the human race but that process didn't exactly work out for all the individuals who did the eating or were offspring of the breeding.
The office upgrade was part of the Munich upgrade. They were upgrading both office suite and OS. Since the OSS solution gives them the latest version of the comparable suite it has to be compared with upgrading to the latest and greatest MS Office.
"Delays it indefinitely. I consider that removing it."
Good for you. A cost that can be foreseen today and is guaranteed to come down the road isn't removed. It's just a fudged statistic.
"Or are you asserting that we must cost all future upgrades into a present upgrade?"
Absolutely. At least the costs that are predictable within the anticipated lifespan of the solution you are upgrading to. It wouldn't be a very accurate savings assessment if you didn't consider the costs of future upgrades that you offset by switching to a platform that doesn't deliberately force you to upgrade or charge for the upgraded software. You also have to consider the costs as if you were upgrading the day of release since your OSS typically stays up to the minute unless you've intentionally chosen to prevent it. So if you estimate your open solution will remain installed and up to date for 7 years and you expect the commercial solutions would have pushed 3 upgrades to stay with the latest stuff in that time you need the cost of those upgrades must be considered as part of the cost of using the commercial solution for this upgrade because they would be saved with the open solution.
We should redefine the gram to match the amount of DNA it takes to store a LOC. Then people would have an easier time switching to metric.
Can't be all bad.
"So they disabled alt-tab and the windows key changed functionality? "
A typical desktop user wouldn't be using either one. The GUI changed, the browser interface changed, the office interface completely changed. Setting the system to XP mode doesn't remove the cost of retraining it just delays it.
"What's the cost to train for Windows when everyone knows Windows?"
Knowing the current version is not the same as knowing the new version. For a desktop user switching to Vista from WinXP was as big a change as switching to Linux.
^^^This
Exactly. Whatever metrics they used here are now proven to be bogus metrics. Undoubtedly they are using the same methodology to reach bogus value assessments now. They don't want people to be able to point out the method is provably invalid.