I think what people like you (not meaning "people like you" as an attack) don't always see is that there is a simply *insane* number of Perl programmers and Perl programs.
Don't see it? What do you think I was alluding to in my respectable fraction comment? Or my teeming millions?
If the language is so rotten, why do you think that it's so incredibly popular?
a: I never said it was rotten, I said it was a mess. b: Why is McDonald's so popular. They're not exactly haute cuisine, you know... Why is the top 40 so often populated with crap? Popular <> good. c: I can't say exactly why it's so popular, and my knowledge of its history is pretty fuzzy, but here are a few of my guesses: It started out by making a lot of stupid, annoying things easier to do, and it was less of a pain and more flexible than, say awk. Plus, it had a syntax that was pretty Algol-ish, so the inherently lazy programmers didn't have to think too hard. So people started using it and sharing scripts.
Then Perl started being used for cgi stuff. It became really popular for cgi. So popular, that pretty much every book that covers cgi covered it from a purely Perl-centric angle. In fact, they never even mentioned that you could use something other than Perl to do your scripting. On top of this, a lot of web hosts only really made Perl available for the scripting environment. Thus, a bunch of folk who wanted to do "fun stuff" with their web pages felt like they *had* to learn Perl. So they did. This lead to another wave of folk learning perl, writing, and sharing scripts.
Eventually, some sort of critical mass is reached where, when deciding to start a project, and deciding what language to use, one sees that there's a lot of stuff out there already written in Perl, so they decide to use Perl, grab some existing modules, and then perhaps toss anything new they write back into the communal pile. Once you reach that critical mass, the language can really take off -- like Perl did. But to reach that mass it helps if there's some external factor pushing the language. For Java it was Sun, for Perl it was cgi and the blossoming of the web, for Ruby it looks like Rails might kick its growth into high gear...
Why is it so *wildly* portable (even moreso than Java)?
Because there's one implementation?
Why do huge sites like Amazon.com and Ticketmaster.com and Slashdot.org rely on it for their core business?
Availability of programmers to do the work. Plus once they settled on Perl they were more or less locked in. No one wants to pay for a rewrite of a system, especially a large system. Why do you think there's so many lines of COBOL still running?
What other language with humble beginnings found its way into, well, everything?
C
Why does every other language feel it necessary to *copy* Perl Regular Expressions - perhaps the *ugliest* part about Perl?
That's easy. They're more compact than using a full-on lexer/parser combo which can be overkill if you just want to tear apart a string. Plus, I'd guess that most people consider them easier to learn than some variant of lex/yacc (which probably led to their overuse). On top of that, we have the fact that Perl did become popular, and a lot of Perl code used regexes, therefore Perl regexes were popular. It seems to me that something like the monadic parser combinators that have become popular in Haskell are a much nicer approach. But again, it's not as compact as Perl regexes, so who knows if they'll take off (despite being orders of magnitude more readible).
It's sad that people have trouble with Perl's syntax because hiding behind the scary surface is a brilliant sort of orderly chaos that's unlike any language I've ever used. In terms of Perl, as a language, I think I've begun to enter a class of 'Perl Mastery', and there are still things I find out about every now and then that the language does that are just utterly fantastic.
Yeah, and crazy people can find god in a bus station bathroom...
Hey, you like and admire Perl, you've achieved some sort of zen oneness with the slop. That's great. That doesn't mean it's not a messy language for most of the rest of the world. I just wonder what things would look like if a language like Haskell were used by a respectable fraction of the number of Perl users. Cripes there's only like 14* people in the world using it, and they've done some pretty amazing things, I wonder what the teeming millions would be able to put out...
* Yeah, yeah, I know. But a little hyperbole never killed anyone.
Meh. I just did that last week with C. Other than the usual issues with the crap Algol-esque syntax and having to look up the order of parameters to a few calls it went swimmingly. For me Perl is much trickier to keep all the various punctuation straight in my head without plunking away at it for a while.
Some others that should be read by most programmers:
The Dragon book Some modern compiler book, like one of Appel's, or possibly the new Aho, Sethi, Lam, and Ullman book when it's released. Purely Functional Data Structures by Chris Okasaki possibly Algorithms : A Functional Programming Approach by A. R. Fethi, though it's a bit light SICP, which has been mentioned a couple of times
and does anyone know if there's a book out there on how to get off your ass and write some good documentation to accompany your code.
Yeah. This is one of the things I'd like to see OCaml (my primary language of choice) steal from Haskell. It's got the ability to define new operators as well, but it's not nearly as flexible in that area as Haskell (without having to pull out the camlp4 hammer).
That's 8-10 episodes per month during the season -- but there's plenty of off season. TV shows only go 22 episodes per year, less than one every other week, while the cable bill never stops... Unlike an electricity bill, the cable bill is constant, whether you turn on the TV or not.
If broadcast quality is ok for you, why not just record it? Use a VCR+small library of tapes, and cycle those as you get a more permanent archival solution.
Because I can't play the tapes on my laptop (among other things). Plus, the shows I download now are HDTV satellite quality recordings, so at the moment I'm doing better than broadcast quality for all but the initial viewing. Now it's just a matter of getting rid of that lag between the initial viewing and the time I can own a high quality, legal copy of the show.
Sure, no one likes changing tapes a lot, but do you really watch the same episode of a show multiple times before it comes out on DVD?
Well, that's becoming less of an issue now that the model is to release the DVDs of season i when season i+1 is beginning to air, rather than 2-3 years down the line. But even still, there are times when I feel like watching some of the shows from the previous season.
Oh, I forgot to mention that television is just "a video extention of an audio system" known as radio, and it hasn't fared too poorly. In the same way, this type of portable is the video extension of CDs (well I suppose MP3s is more correct).
But this isn't portable TV, it's portable video display and recorded shows. A small but important difference.
When I go on business trips, I usually pack a few DVDs, either movies or TV shows. I don't do it because my hotel won't have a television. I do it because it allows me to watch what I want, when I want it. I can pause it if I need to, I can rewatch parts if I want to, hell, I can carry my laptop into the bathroom if I want and watch a movie while soaking in the tub if I want... try doing that with the television in the hotel room.
You're paying more for less just so you can get it now. If you are serious about TV, you'll have a PVR to time-shift TV and you'll buy DVDs for archiving. If you aren't serious about TV, you'll certainly never buy the episodes online.
But what if you're only serious about a handful of shows? Right now, there are precisely two shows that I watch on TV. I watch them via broadcast, then download each week's episode for watching later if I want, and then I buy the DVDs later when they are released, dumping my archive for next season's shows. To go your way, I'd need to buy a PVR setup, and then add about another 30-50 $/month for the cable/satellite so I could record my shows with good quality. It's just not worth it.
Now, if I could buy and download those shows in high quality right after they're aired, I don't need to wait until the DVDs are released to own a legitimate copy, and I have the ability to watch the episodes any time after the download, and I'm paying less than I would with your solution. Of course none of the shows offered now are high quality video, or anything I care to watch, but it's a step in the right direction.
Yeah, I was reading that a couple weeks ago. Lesson I got out of it (might be wrong, but if it is, it's wrong in a good way): all linear recursion, deep down, boils down to "copying" some recursive "data structure"; scare quotes because you get to pick your own "fake" constructors, destructors and type predicates. Thus, linear recursion boils down to "copying" a "list," and iteration (i.e. tail recusion) boils down to "reversing" a "list."
Well, there's a bit more to it than that. I suppose that might be the message of the first five pages which describe the different morphisms available for lists (and for another view of what you're describing, I recommend Mitch Wand's Continuation-Based Program Transformation Strategies), but the real meat of the paper is the laws that they derive regarding those morphisms that work for any algebraic data type (I still need to read Bananas In Space, which I believe extends their work to exponential data types). It's one of those papers that's both really interesting and really uninteresting at the same time.
Sure, if you want an uglier, single paradigm language that's harder to maintain, it's great.
Uglier is in the eye of the beholder. Hell all I hear about Python is how clear and clean it is, but every time I look at it I can't help but think how ugly it is, with all of it's __some_crap_or_another__ and whatnot. Sure, it's nicer than, say, C++, but that's a bit like saying someone is cuter than Karl Malden... Bottom line, saying something is uglier should mean little to anyone who isn't you -- we all like and dislike different things for different reasons.
As for harder to maintain, I suppose you have some evidence to back up this assertion? If you do, I'd love to see it...
The "lines of code" argument is tired, old and bullshit, frankly. Anyone can write a minimal line version of practically anything, but that says nothing for maintainability, readinability or anything else.
I pretty much agree with you on the first point. I won't say it's BS, but I do believe that it's overhyped. The part you may or may not be missing is that it's not the ability to squeeze tokens out of an algorithm that's important. It's the ability to say a lot, and clearly, with just a few words that's important (a subtle but real distinction). This was touched on a bit by Simon Booth and Simon Jones in their paper Are Ours Really Smaller Than Theirs? It's the succinctness that they talk about that is important, as it should lead to fewer errors, and actually aid maintainability and readability as it allows a person to keep more of the program in their head. Of course I don't know if it actually does this -- I'd love to see some follow on research...
Someone's written a 3 line RSA utility in perl, but have you taken a look
Still a pretty damn important technique that one should master in functional languages--recognizing the "shape" of a loop (is it a map? a left or right fold? an unfold?), and implementing the looping logic as a higher-order function separately from its specific uses.
Learn the squiggol, it shall set you free (or rub your eyes and curse the development of category theory...)
How to Design Programs is an entry level programming book, meant to teach high schoolers and people with NO programming experience. Any CS graduate should be intimately familiar with its teachings, and that of the more grown-up SICP.
One would like to think so. However, given the "quality" of a number of posts here on slashdot, it seems not to be the case. It seems that too many folk out there never grasped concepts as basic as recursion, much less HOF, and could do with a refresher from something like HTDP.
As for SICP, it's a wonderful book, but a terrible read. I'm guessing a lot of people out there would fare better with the Abelson & Sussman lecture videos.
The ICFP is the International Conference on Functional Programming, and the ICFP programming contest is (not surprisingly) a programming contest held in conjunction with the ICFP (the contest specs are usually announced around June -- look for a story on slashdot next summer). However, despite the connection to the ICFP, the contest places no restriction on the languages you can use. Well, I assume they require that your language produce a result that they can run on their testing machines, but that's it.
The ICFP contest accepts submissions written in any language. In this year's contest, there were 34 C++ entries (the most of any language), 20 Python, 19 Java, 10 C, and 9 Perl entries -- of the "functional" languages, there were 21 OCaml entries, 16 Haskell, and a mishmash of "others" like Dylan, Erlang, scheme, etc.
For the record, how can something be both unintuitive and logical?:)
Because intuition and logic aren't the same thing. For a simple example take the birthday paradox (which isn't a paradox, but I didn't name it so don't blame me). It is completely unintuitive that a random set of 23 people has a greater than 50% chance of containing at two people who share a birthday. However, a straightforward proof shows that this is indeed the case.
Another logical, yet unintuitive thing is that the cardinality of the integers and rational numbers is the same...
The problem is that collisions, i.e. two inputs that hash to the same value, can be found in much less time than wold be expected (a couple of hours instead of the expected couple thousand years).
And while this doesn't allow a lot of interesting attacks (though we have already seen where one can use these collisions to create two postscript documents or TIFF images that display different contents, but hash to the same value), it is still a major weakness with the algorithm that may lead to further more dangerous exploits.
I was going to mod you Overrated, but I decided to post instead.
This is not about buzzword compliance. The three algorithms that they are banning should have been done away with years ago. DES has been fairly easily crackable via burute force for nearly a decade now, and MD4 has had issues for just about as long. And now that collisions can be found for MD4 essentially by hand, it shouldn't be used for anything of any importance.
Hell, even NIST is recommending that people start figuring out ways to phase out their use of SHA-1, which is still practically secure, but starting to show cracks. And if there ever was an orginization free of buzzwords, it's NIST (I dare you to read some of their FIPS documents without passing out).
This is a good move that nedeed to be done. It's a step in the right direction -- now they need to get on with shoring up the other holes in their codebase.
Slashdot Mirror
It works just fine with the Apple keyboards as well.
Launch Terminal (Finder -> Applications -> Utilities -> Terminal.app)
then just use: edit, save, have at it.
Damn those shiny bash buttons! Waitaminute...
I think what people like you (not meaning "people like you" as an attack) don't always see is that there is a simply *insane* number of Perl programmers and Perl programs.
Don't see it? What do you think I was alluding to in my respectable fraction comment? Or my teeming millions?
If the language is so rotten, why do you think that it's so incredibly popular?
a: I never said it was rotten, I said it was a mess.
b: Why is McDonald's so popular. They're not exactly haute cuisine, you know... Why is the top 40 so often populated with crap? Popular <> good.
c: I can't say exactly why it's so popular, and my knowledge of its history is pretty fuzzy, but here are a few of my guesses:
It started out by making a lot of stupid, annoying things easier to do, and it was less of a pain and more flexible than, say awk. Plus, it had a syntax that was pretty Algol-ish, so the inherently lazy programmers didn't have to think too hard. So people started using it and sharing scripts.
Then Perl started being used for cgi stuff. It became really popular for cgi. So popular, that pretty much every book that covers cgi covered it from a purely Perl-centric angle. In fact, they never even mentioned that you could use something other than Perl to do your scripting. On top of this, a lot of web hosts only really made Perl available for the scripting environment. Thus, a bunch of folk who wanted to do "fun stuff" with their web pages felt like they *had* to learn Perl. So they did. This lead to another wave of folk learning perl, writing, and sharing scripts.
Eventually, some sort of critical mass is reached where, when deciding to start a project, and deciding what language to use, one sees that there's a lot of stuff out there already written in Perl, so they decide to use Perl, grab some existing modules, and then perhaps toss anything new they write back into the communal pile. Once you reach that critical mass, the language can really take off -- like Perl did. But to reach that mass it helps if there's some external factor pushing the language. For Java it was Sun, for Perl it was cgi and the blossoming of the web, for Ruby it looks like Rails might kick its growth into high gear...
Why is it so *wildly* portable (even moreso than Java)?
Because there's one implementation?
Why do huge sites like Amazon.com and Ticketmaster.com and Slashdot.org rely on it for their core business?
Availability of programmers to do the work. Plus once they settled on Perl they were more or less locked in. No one wants to pay for a rewrite of a system, especially a large system. Why do you think there's so many lines of COBOL still running?
What other language with humble beginnings found its way into, well, everything?
C
Why does every other language feel it necessary to *copy* Perl Regular Expressions - perhaps the *ugliest* part about Perl?
That's easy. They're more compact than using a full-on lexer/parser combo which can be overkill if you just want to tear apart a string. Plus, I'd guess that most people consider them easier to learn than some variant of lex/yacc (which probably led to their overuse). On top of that, we have the fact that Perl did become popular, and a lot of Perl code used regexes, therefore Perl regexes were popular. It seems to me that something like the monadic parser combinators that have become popular in Haskell are a much nicer approach. But again, it's not as compact as Perl regexes, so who knows if they'll take off (despite being orders of magnitude more readible).
It's sad that people have trouble with Perl's syntax because hiding behind the scary surface is a brilliant sort of orderly chaos that's unlike any language I've ever used. In terms of Perl, as a language, I think I've begun to enter a class of 'Perl Mastery', and there are still things I find out about every now and then that the language does that are just utterly fantastic.
Yeah, and crazy people can find god in a bus station bathroom...
Hey, you like and admire Perl, you've achieved some sort of zen oneness with the slop. That's great. That doesn't mean it's not a messy language for most of the rest of the world. I just wonder what things would look like if a language like Haskell were used by a respectable fraction of the number of Perl users. Cripes there's only like 14* people in the world using it, and they've done some pretty amazing things, I wonder what the teeming millions would be able to put out...
* Yeah, yeah, I know. But a little hyperbole never killed anyone.
as far as i can tell, the .pl at the end of the page name means it's written in perl.
Or prolog.
Meh. I just did that last week with C.
Other than the usual issues with the crap Algol-esque syntax and having to look up the order of parameters to a few calls it went swimmingly. For me Perl is much trickier to keep all the various punctuation straight in my head without plunking away at it for a while.
Some others that should be read by most programmers:
The Dragon book
Some modern compiler book, like one of Appel's, or possibly the new Aho, Sethi, Lam, and Ullman book when it's released.
Purely Functional Data Structures by Chris Okasaki
possibly Algorithms : A Functional Programming Approach by A. R. Fethi, though it's a bit light
SICP, which has been mentioned a couple of times
and does anyone know if there's a book out there on how to get off your ass and write some good documentation to accompany your code.
So basically, you can choose any language you want. So long as it comes from their dizzying array of... four?
Um... yay?
Yeah, but it's still a fairly sketchy bit of syntax. I much prefer an unambiguous notation, like in ocaml:
012 = 12 (decimal)
0o12 = 10 (decimal)
0x12 = 18 (decimal)
0b12 = Fry says, "Its OK Bender. There's no such thing as two."
Yeah. This is one of the things I'd like to see OCaml (my primary language of choice) steal from Haskell. It's got the ability to define new operators as well, but it's not nearly as flexible in that area as Haskell (without having to pull out the camlp4 hammer).
Meh. I really need to do more Haskell coding.
That's 8-10 episodes per month during the season -- but there's plenty of off season. TV shows only go 22 episodes per year, less than one every other week, while the cable bill never stops... Unlike an electricity bill, the cable bill is constant, whether you turn on the TV or not.
If broadcast quality is ok for you, why not just record it? Use a VCR+small library of tapes, and cycle those as you get a more permanent archival solution.
Because I can't play the tapes on my laptop (among other things). Plus, the shows I download now are HDTV satellite quality recordings, so at the moment I'm doing better than broadcast quality for all but the initial viewing. Now it's just a matter of getting rid of that lag between the initial viewing and the time I can own a high quality, legal copy of the show.
Sure, no one likes changing tapes a lot, but do you really watch the same episode of a show multiple times before it comes out on DVD?
Well, that's becoming less of an issue now that the model is to release the DVDs of season i when season i+1 is beginning to air, rather than 2-3 years down the line. But even still, there are times when I feel like watching some of the shows from the previous season.
Oh, I forgot to mention that television is just "a video extention of an audio system" known as radio, and it hasn't fared too poorly. In the same way, this type of portable is the video extension of CDs (well I suppose MP3s is more correct).
But this isn't portable TV, it's portable video display and recorded shows. A small but important difference.
When I go on business trips, I usually pack a few DVDs, either movies or TV shows. I don't do it because my hotel won't have a television. I do it because it allows me to watch what I want, when I want it. I can pause it if I need to, I can rewatch parts if I want to, hell, I can carry my laptop into the bathroom if I want and watch a movie while soaking in the tub if I want... try doing that with the television in the hotel room.
You're paying more for less just so you can get it now. If you are serious about TV, you'll have a PVR to time-shift TV and you'll buy DVDs for archiving. If you aren't serious about TV, you'll certainly never buy the episodes online.
But what if you're only serious about a handful of shows? Right now, there are precisely two shows that I watch on TV. I watch them via broadcast, then download each week's episode for watching later if I want, and then I buy the DVDs later when they are released, dumping my archive for next season's shows. To go your way, I'd need to buy a PVR setup, and then add about another 30-50 $/month for the cable/satellite so I could record my shows with good quality. It's just not worth it.
Now, if I could buy and download those shows in high quality right after they're aired, I don't need to wait until the DVDs are released to own a legitimate copy, and I have the ability to watch the episodes any time after the download, and I'm paying less than I would with your solution. Of course none of the shows offered now are high quality video, or anything I care to watch, but it's a step in the right direction.
Yeah, I was reading that a couple weeks ago. Lesson I got out of it (might be wrong, but if it is, it's wrong in a good way): all linear recursion, deep down, boils down to "copying" some recursive "data structure"; scare quotes because you get to pick your own "fake" constructors, destructors and type predicates. Thus, linear recursion boils down to "copying" a "list," and iteration (i.e. tail recusion) boils down to "reversing" a "list."
Well, there's a bit more to it than that. I suppose that might be the message of the first five pages which describe the different morphisms available for lists (and for another view of what you're describing, I recommend Mitch Wand's Continuation-Based Program Transformation Strategies), but the real meat of the paper is the laws that they derive regarding those morphisms that work for any algebraic data type (I still need to read Bananas In Space, which I believe extends their work to exponential data types). It's one of those papers that's both really interesting and really uninteresting at the same time.
Sure, if you want an uglier, single paradigm language that's harder to maintain, it's great.
Uglier is in the eye of the beholder. Hell all I hear about Python is how clear and clean it is, but every time I look at it I can't help but think how ugly it is, with all of it's __some_crap_or_another__ and whatnot. Sure, it's nicer than, say, C++, but that's a bit like saying someone is cuter than Karl Malden... Bottom line, saying something is uglier should mean little to anyone who isn't you -- we all like and dislike different things for different reasons.
As for harder to maintain, I suppose you have some evidence to back up this assertion? If you do, I'd love to see it...
The "lines of code" argument is tired, old and bullshit, frankly. Anyone can write a minimal line version of practically anything, but that says nothing for maintainability, readinability or anything else.
I pretty much agree with you on the first point. I won't say it's BS, but I do believe that it's overhyped. The part you may or may not be missing is that it's not the ability to squeeze tokens out of an algorithm that's important. It's the ability to say a lot, and clearly, with just a few words that's important (a subtle but real distinction). This was touched on a bit by Simon Booth and Simon Jones in their paper Are Ours Really Smaller Than Theirs? It's the succinctness that they talk about that is important, as it should lead to fewer errors, and actually aid maintainability and readability as it allows a person to keep more of the program in their head. Of course I don't know if it actually does this -- I'd love to see some follow on research...
Someone's written a 3 line RSA utility in perl, but have you taken a look
Taken a look at it? Hell, I own the t-shirt!
Still a pretty damn important technique that one should master in functional languages--recognizing the "shape" of a loop (is it a map? a left or right fold? an unfold?), and implementing the looping logic as a higher-order function separately from its specific uses.
Learn the squiggol, it shall set you free (or rub your eyes and curse the development of category theory...)
How to Design Programs is an entry level programming book, meant to teach high schoolers and people with NO programming experience. Any CS graduate should be intimately familiar with its teachings, and that of the more grown-up SICP.
One would like to think so. However, given the "quality" of a number of posts here on slashdot, it seems not to be the case. It seems that too many folk out there never grasped concepts as basic as recursion, much less HOF, and could do with a refresher from something like HTDP.
As for SICP, it's a wonderful book, but a terrible read. I'm guessing a lot of people out there would fare better with the Abelson & Sussman lecture videos.
2004:
Judges prize: OCaml
Lightning division winner: Java, C++, Perl, and m4
Main division: (1st) Haskell, (2nd) Haskell and C++
2003:
Judges prize: C++ and Dylan
Lightning division winner: OCaml
Main division: (1st) C++, (2nd) C++, (3rd) OCaml
2002:
Judges prize: Python
Main division: (1st) OCaml, (2nd) C
2001:
Judges prize: Erlang
Main division: (1st) Haskell, (2nd) Dylan, (3rd) OCaml/C (a tie between two teams)
2000:
Judges prize: SML
Main division: (1st) OCaml, (2nd) OCaml, (3rd) Haskell, (4th) Mercury
1999:
Judges prize: Haskell
Main division: (1st) OCaml, (2nd) Haskell
1998:
Judges prize: J
Main division: (1st) Cilk, (2nd) OCaml
The ICFP is the International Conference on Functional Programming, and the ICFP programming contest is (not surprisingly) a programming contest held in conjunction with the ICFP (the contest specs are usually announced around June -- look for a story on slashdot next summer). However, despite the connection to the ICFP, the contest places no restriction on the languages you can use. Well, I assume they require that your language produce a result that they can run on their testing machines, but that's it.
The ICFP contest accepts submissions written in any language. In this year's contest, there were 34 C++ entries (the most of any language), 20 Python, 19 Java, 10 C, and 9 Perl entries -- of the "functional" languages, there were 21 OCaml entries, 16 Haskell, and a mishmash of "others" like Dylan, Erlang, scheme, etc.
For the record, how can something be both unintuitive and logical? :)
Because intuition and logic aren't the same thing. For a simple example take the birthday paradox (which isn't a paradox, but I didn't name it so don't blame me). It is completely unintuitive that a random set of 23 people has a greater than 50% chance of containing at two people who share a birthday. However, a straightforward proof shows that this is indeed the case.
Another logical, yet unintuitive thing is that the cardinality of the integers and rational numbers is the same...
The problem is that collisions, i.e. two inputs that hash to the same value, can be found in much less time than wold be expected (a couple of hours instead of the expected couple thousand years).
And while this doesn't allow a lot of interesting attacks (though we have already seen where one can use these collisions to create two postscript documents or TIFF images that display different contents, but hash to the same value), it is still a major weakness with the algorithm that may lead to further more dangerous exploits.
I was going to mod you Overrated, but I decided to post instead.
This is not about buzzword compliance. The three algorithms that they are banning should have been done away with years ago. DES has been fairly easily crackable via burute force for nearly a decade now, and MD4 has had issues for just about as long. And now that collisions can be found for MD4 essentially by hand, it shouldn't be used for anything of any importance.
Hell, even NIST is recommending that people start figuring out ways to phase out their use of SHA-1, which is still practically secure, but starting to show cracks. And if there ever was an orginization free of buzzwords, it's NIST (I dare you to read some of their FIPS documents without passing out).
This is a good move that nedeed to be done. It's a step in the right direction -- now they need to get on with shoring up the other holes in their codebase.