My favorite Perl feature is "unless". I've amazed a number of people who think that Perl is only executable line noise by giving them a line of code like
unless ($sandwich =~/mustard/i) { print "You forgot the mustard on my sandwich again.\n"; }
because once they think about it for a moment, not only do they know exactly what unless does, they realize that it can make your code more readable. I greatly prefer it to an "if (! $test)" construct.
There are many great things about Perl, but foreach and unless are right up toward the top.
But why would you want a language that can solve both small and large problems?
So that in the grand Unix tradition, you can learn one language and learn it well.
Why not use a good language to solve "small problems" for "small problems", and a good language to solve "large problems" for "large problems"?
I would say Perl is a good language to solve both small and large problems. But then Perl is my main axe.
Of course, I would probably argue that Perl cannot solve "large problems" after creating 100k+ line Perl applications. The problem lies that the reason languages like Perl is good for quick and dirty hacks is just the reason they are not that good for large systems that needs to be maintained over longer periods of time with many developers involved.
Writing and maintaining large applications in Perl is similar to writing and maintaining large applications in other languages. The shops where I've worked with large Perl systems broke the big problem down into lots of smaller problems -- in other words we modularized everything, then when there was a problem we could track it down to the module in question and troubleshoot that rather than having to plow through a single stack of code the size of the Manhattan telephone directory.
Don't get me wrong. For many, maybe most, large applications there may be a better language than Perl to write the application in. (Operating systems and embedded code come immediately to mind.) If it's properly structured, managed and documented, however, there's no reason a large project couldn't be done in Perl -- and such structure, management and documentation should be a part of any large software project anyway.
One of the problems I see with people learning Perl is that they think it should have strict typing, or some different kind of inheritance, or whatever, and because Perl doesn't have that particular feature they get frustrated and go away grumbling and end up going back to C or Java or whatever language has the feature they miss.
Perl is Perl. It isn't C and it isn't Java. If you go into learning it with an open mind and a determination to use its features rather than trying to bend it to your idea of what a programming language HAS to be, you'll be fine.
And if you never write complicated GUIs in Perl and only use it for parsing text, that's fine too. After all, it started out as a practical extraction and reporting language. All the really good stuff just came along later.
Oh, and to answer the question, learn Perl 5. You'll be able to use it to get up to speed in the time it will take Perl 6 to become beta.
Au contraire, mon frere. Here is what I found when googling for the subject:
Alfred Vail, Morse's assistant, was the inventor of the telegraph hand-key and sounder. He also made changes where characters were defined by spaces and dashes, as well as dits. 'HO HO' or 'HEE HEE', were used for laughter or humor. These are incorrectly sent today as 'HI HI'. The error results from the confusion in the early days of amateur radio, between the use of the Continental or International Morse code, and the Landline/Railway or American Morse code. In the American Morse code, 'O' is sent as two dits, spaced slightly farther apart than the two dits in the letter 'I' Radio amateurs, not familiar with the American Morse code,, picked it up as 'HI HI', instead of 'HEE HEE' or 'HO HO'.
I beg to differ. They can both be transliterated as.... ..
Much shorter, and, well, Morse is all about abbreviations.
I occasionally hear guys on the local repeater saying "hi hi" when they make a witticism, which is silly because it seems obvious that the Morse "smiley face" is "hee hee" and over time the two dits of "ee" just ran together to make an "i".
A link to between SCO and Legget & Platt was pointed out on Groklaw:
http://216.211.138.77/company/mangmnt.htm
Michael O'Brien, CEO and Founder of goahead software presented at a SCO conference. From 1993 until 1999, Douglas W. Brown(now president of goahead software) was president of a Seattle area manufacturing company that was acquired by Leggett & Platt,
Make of it what you will.
By the way, the Carthage that figures prominently in LDS history is in Illinois, not Missouri.
Abso-bleepin-lootly not. Larry Ewing created the image, and if someone tried to copyright it they would have a very hard time proving it was their original work. Case in point: MAD Magazine popularized the loveable idiot we know as Alfred E. Newman, but never copyrighted or trademarked his image. In fact in the 1960s they went to great lengths to show that variations of the picture dated back to the turn of the 20th century, because someone else was trying to sue them in a claim that they held the copyright to the image. (MAD won the case). In an early manifestation of the Groklaw Effect, MAD asked its readers to submit copies of the picture for evidence in the lawsuit, which was how they came up with the prior art.
So presumably you could use Alfred, or Tux, to sell shampoo or emblazon the cover of your garage band's CD without any reference to MAD or Linux. But if you ask me, it would be less than ethical to do so.
I use Linux not because I rebel against anyone, it's just that I got tired of the blue-screen-of-death cum you-gimme-more-$$$-and-we-still-won't-fix-the -bug thingy so I switched.
Which means that, whether you realize it or not, whether you acknowledge it or not, you're part of the rebellion. Ninety-some percent of the world's PC desktops run some form of Windows, so they say. By using Linux you're going against this established order, and although you may not be standing outside Bill's office with a picket sign, I would say the switch is an act of rebellion.
Fine, except this isn't entirely directly about the court case. Last month SCOX sent out a raft of letters telling Linux users that their use of the ABIs was a violation of SCO's intellectual property rights, whatever that phrase means, so expect to hear from SCO's lawyers or license salesmen in the near future.
This analysis shows that whatever else is going on, and independent of whether the files are copyrightable at all (a separate question also covered recently on Groklaw), Caldera willingly and knowingly released those files under the GPL. Therefore their letter is so much donkey doo. No one has to pay them a red cent for the use of the ABIs, and if SCOX tries to get money out of anyone for that purpose it is fraud and extortion, and the companies involved should contact their lawyers and the FBI.
This is my opinion, and I am not a lawyer. If you find yourself in this situation, of course, contact your own lawyer before you do anything else and get specific advice.
This was apparently reported by the Moscow Times and is generally considered to be, shall we say, of doubtful veracity. If the FBI had raided SCO's offices, we'd have heard, Groklaw would have been all over it and McBride and Sontag would have cancelled their dog and pony show at Harvard on Monday.
There's the IBM vs. SCO countersuit, the Redhat vs. SCO suit, and the SCO vs. Novell suit, for starters. After SCO turns into a smoking caldera there's still Microsoft, and there will probably be other interesting cases to cover. Groklaw will never be short for material.
What I wonder is what will happen when Groklaw starts to follow a case where the issues don't appear to be as overwhelmingly in favor of one side as this one. That could get very interesting.
Well, Robert Goulet as the penguin singing "You've Got A Friend In Me" in Toy Story 2 was bordeline stupid. But, the rest of the music in both Toy Story Movies was pretty good. How can you beat Riders In The Sky and Randy Newman?
But I think your point is that the Pixar movies aren't intended to be animated musicals, which is valid.
You also left "inexplicable cute animal companion of the hero(ine)" off the list.
Take a look at the credits of most of the recent crop of Disney's animated sequels and spinoff shows (e.g. Lilo and Stitch: The Series). They're shipping a lot of work overseas already.
Not having to look at someone can do wonders. I can't stand Gilbert Gottfried, but he was great as Iago in Aladdin. And I heard more than one person who swore they'd never go see an Ellen DeGeneres movie do a double take when they found out she was the voice of Dory in Finding Nemo.
I'm afraid you've got it all wrong. You have to grep before you can grope. In fact if you grope before you grep, you can end up with la grippe.. Especially if you grope in a group.
Don't kid yourself. If somehow we all fall down the rabbit hole and SCOX wins this case, The Darl has already said he'll go after BSD next, and presumably he'd have the war chest to do it.
This, however, has zero chance of happening, plus or minus a fudge factor of zero.
Open source is going to drive down the value of software.
Nope. It will drive down the price while increasing the value.
It prevents lock-in while allowing practically anyone to enter the market for a relatively low capital investment.
This is why it will increase the value.
Besides, who said all companies who adopt Linux will do so to make and give away software? Most will be doing the same thing they do with Windows -- paying in-house coders to write software for company use that will never be distributed to the outside world. They will just be paying less for the platform they write it to run on.
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There are many great things about Perl, but foreach and unless are right up toward the top.
But why would you want a language that can solve both small and large problems?
So that in the grand Unix tradition, you can learn one language and learn it well.
Why not use a good language to solve "small problems" for "small problems", and a good language to solve "large problems" for "large problems"?
I would say Perl is a good language to solve both small and large problems. But then Perl is my main axe.
Of course, I would probably argue that Perl cannot solve "large problems" after creating 100k+ line Perl applications. The problem lies that the reason languages like Perl is good for quick and dirty hacks is just the reason they are not that good for large systems that needs to be maintained over longer periods of time with many developers involved.
Writing and maintaining large applications in Perl is similar to writing and maintaining large applications in other languages. The shops where I've worked with large Perl systems broke the big problem down into lots of smaller problems -- in other words we modularized everything, then when there was a problem we could track it down to the module in question and troubleshoot that rather than having to plow through a single stack of code the size of the Manhattan telephone directory.
Don't get me wrong. For many, maybe most, large applications there may be a better language than Perl to write the application in. (Operating systems and embedded code come immediately to mind.) If it's properly structured, managed and documented, however, there's no reason a large project couldn't be done in Perl -- and such structure, management and documentation should be a part of any large software project anyway.
One of the problems I see with people learning Perl is that they think it should have strict typing, or some different kind of inheritance, or whatever, and because Perl doesn't have that particular feature they get frustrated and go away grumbling and end up going back to C or Java or whatever language has the feature they miss.
Perl is Perl. It isn't C and it isn't Java. If you go into learning it with an open mind and a determination to use its features rather than trying to bend it to your idea of what a programming language HAS to be, you'll be fine.
And if you never write complicated GUIs in Perl and only use it for parsing text, that's fine too. After all, it started out as a practical extraction and reporting language. All the really good stuff just came along later.
Oh, and to answer the question, learn Perl 5. You'll be able to use it to get up to speed in the time it will take Perl 6 to become beta.
Au contraire, mon frere. Here is what I found when googling for the subject:
Alfred Vail, Morse's assistant, was the inventor of the telegraph hand-key and sounder. He also made changes where characters were defined by spaces and dashes, as well as dits. 'HO HO' or 'HEE HEE', were used for laughter or humor. These are incorrectly sent today as 'HI HI'. The error results from the confusion in the early days of amateur radio, between the use of the Continental or International Morse code, and the Landline/Railway or American Morse code. In the American Morse code, 'O' is sent as two dits, spaced slightly farther apart than the two dits in the letter 'I' Radio amateurs, not familiar with the American Morse code,, picked it up as 'HI HI', instead of 'HEE HEE' or 'HO HO'.
(found here on page 6)
I believe there's also an article about it that's linked from AC6V's massive ham radio site.
Oh great, the first new Morse symbol in almost 100 years and it turns out to be short for "Anonymous Coward."
I beg to differ. They can both be transliterated as .... . .
:).
Much shorter, and, well, Morse is all about abbreviations.
I occasionally hear guys on the local repeater saying "hi hi" when they make a witticism, which is silly because it seems obvious that the Morse "smiley face" is "hee hee" and over time the two dits of "ee" just ran together to make an "i".
Then again I could be wrong, hi hi. Er,
Sorry, my wife uses Linux and you can't have her. Besides, she already fell for that trick once.
A link to between SCO and Legget & Platt was pointed out on Groklaw:
http://216.211.138.77/company/mangmnt.htm
Michael O'Brien, CEO and Founder of goahead software presented at a SCO
conference.
From 1993 until 1999, Douglas W. Brown(now president of goahead software) was
president of a Seattle area manufacturing company that was acquired by Leggett
& Platt,
Make of it what you will.
By the way, the Carthage that figures prominently in LDS history is in Illinois, not Missouri.
Abso-bleepin-lootly not. Larry Ewing created the image, and if someone tried to copyright it they would have a very hard time proving it was their original work. Case in point: MAD Magazine popularized the loveable idiot we know as Alfred E. Newman, but never copyrighted or trademarked his image. In fact in the 1960s they went to great lengths to show that variations of the picture dated back to the turn of the 20th century, because someone else was trying to sue them in a claim that they held the copyright to the image. (MAD won the case). In an early manifestation of the Groklaw Effect, MAD asked its readers to submit copies of the picture for evidence in the lawsuit, which was how they came up with the prior art.
So presumably you could use Alfred, or Tux, to sell shampoo or emblazon the cover of your garage band's CD without any reference to MAD or Linux. But if you ask me, it would be less than ethical to do so.
I use Linux not because I rebel against anyone, it's just that I got tired of the blue-screen-of-death cume -bug thingy so I switched.
you-gimme-more-$$$-and-we-still-won't-fix-th
Which means that, whether you realize it or not, whether you acknowledge it or not, you're part of the rebellion. Ninety-some percent of the world's PC desktops run some form of Windows, so they say. By using Linux you're going against this established order, and although you may not be standing outside Bill's office with a picket sign, I would say the switch is an act of rebellion.
Fine, except this isn't entirely directly about the court case. Last month SCOX sent out a raft of letters telling Linux users that their use of the ABIs was a violation of SCO's intellectual property rights, whatever that phrase means, so expect to hear from SCO's lawyers or license salesmen in the near future.
This analysis shows that whatever else is going on, and independent of whether the files are copyrightable at all (a separate question also covered recently on Groklaw), Caldera willingly and knowingly released those files under the GPL. Therefore their letter is so much donkey doo. No one has to pay them a red cent for the use of the ABIs, and if SCOX tries to get money out of anyone for that purpose it is fraud and extortion, and the companies involved should contact their lawyers and the FBI.
This is my opinion, and I am not a lawyer. If you find yourself in this situation, of course, contact your own lawyer before you do anything else and get specific advice.
This was apparently reported by the Moscow Times and is generally considered to be, shall we say, of doubtful veracity. If the FBI had raided SCO's offices, we'd have heard, Groklaw would have been all over it and McBride and Sontag would have cancelled their dog and pony show at Harvard on Monday.
There's the IBM vs. SCO countersuit, the Redhat vs. SCO suit, and the SCO vs. Novell suit, for starters. After SCO turns into a smoking caldera there's still Microsoft, and there will probably be other interesting cases to cover. Groklaw will never be short for material.
What I wonder is what will happen when Groklaw starts to follow a case where the issues don't appear to be as overwhelmingly in favor of one side as this one. That could get very interesting.
Forget what they say in public. Watch what they say to the court. They can get in big trouble if they lie to the court.
They are probably also in big trouble if their public statements get brought into court, but that's another story.
You can't write a Perl program without punctuation.
&duh();
Well, Robert Goulet as the penguin singing "You've Got A Friend In Me" in Toy Story 2 was bordeline stupid. But, the rest of the music in both Toy Story Movies was pretty good. How can you beat Riders In The Sky and Randy Newman?
But I think your point is that the Pixar movies aren't intended to be animated musicals, which is valid.
You also left "inexplicable cute animal companion of the hero(ine)" off the list.
Take a look at the credits of most of the recent crop of Disney's animated sequels and spinoff shows (e.g. Lilo and Stitch: The Series). They're shipping a lot of work overseas already.
Not having to look at someone can do wonders. I can't stand Gilbert Gottfried, but he was great as Iago in Aladdin. And I heard more than one person who swore they'd never go see an Ellen DeGeneres movie do a double take when they found out she was the voice of Dory in Finding Nemo.
I'm afraid you've got it all wrong. You have to grep before you can grope. In fact if you grope before you grep, you can end up with la grippe. . Especially if you grope in a group.
Don't kid yourself. If somehow we all fall down the rabbit hole and SCOX wins this case, The Darl has already said he'll go after BSD next, and presumably he'd have the war chest to do it.
This, however, has zero chance of happening, plus or minus a fudge factor of zero.
"I'll take Irony for $1000, Alex."
Yeah, it looks to me like a cross between a credit card solicitation and a Nigerian 419 spam.
Open source is going to drive down the value of software.
Nope. It will drive down the price while increasing the value.
It prevents lock-in while allowing practically anyone to enter the market for a relatively low capital investment.
This is why it will increase the value.
Besides, who said all companies who adopt Linux will do so to make and give away software? Most will be doing the same thing they do with Windows -- paying in-house coders to write software for company use that will never be distributed to the outside world. They will just be paying less for the platform they write it to run on.
When Linux is outlawed, only outlaws will run Linux!
They'll take my copy of Linux when they pry it from my cold, dead flippers!
. . aw nuts, it's tired and I'm late, I can't think of any more right now.
Oh come on, you can do better than that.
(Click the link, you'll like it)