It means samba can function as your Bondage and Discipline Cop.
What happens is that if you fail to listen to your Primary Domain Controller, the Bondage and Discipline Cop steps in to beat and humiliate you until you submit creditentials to the proper authorities. Usually, this happens when you're standing in front of many people and attempting to get at Powerpoint slides you left on your client machine.
That's a good point. (In general, I find this a neat topic; forgive me if I ramble.)
The most obvious form of this sort of thing is sampling - think Queen bass lines and huge parachute pants.
Quake used a lot of effects very similar to Nine Inch Nails songs (which isn't very surprising, considering Trent Reznor worked on sound effects).
Other artists reuse or contstruct sound-alikes for artistic nods, as you mention. It also is done to suggest irony or absurdist humor (think slide whistles and cartonny-spring "boing" noises). It can be really subtle, or it can be a Malcolm in the Middle episode. Or it can be a Simpsons episode - it never fails to amaze me that a lot of people miss so many of the not-so-subtle references they make. (Then again, I'm sure I miss some, too.)
If pictures tell a kiloword, a good sound effect can instill a single, hard to describe sensation of placement in a very different environment than a movie theater or desk chair.
All of which brings me back to my original point. If you're making a game, it could be that generic "bonk", "splat", "wonk-wonk" noises are all you need if you're cloning a game or doing something derivative or ironic. If you're attempting to do something original, you need to think a little harder about it, and maybe hang out with a local musician or sound engineer for a while.
Complicated task, no community
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Free Sound Samples?
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· Score: 3, Insightful
Contrary to what many people may think, a good sound effect is a real art to produce. It takes a lot of knowledge about what sort of baseline noises can be manipulated into what effects, how to do it, a lot of screwing around (in a very directed fashion), and the ability to know when it is done. Each of those steps is a learned skill. Doing them all together in a way that gets results is hard.
This sort of thing is not similar to OS development - it is more of an art form. Clip art might be something that could be open source, but good art will never be. Sound design is much closer to art than coding.
Before you disagree, think about good code being usable in as many places as possible, and then think about whether sound effects for your favorite movie or game can be leveraged into every other movie or game and give you the same feeling.
Many people could produce random noises, but there's no point. "Here's a game over sound. I think it works for most every game I've played, so I'm releasing it."
Either Macdaddy is right, or it means the Supreme Court Of The US.
Common acronym used by people who talk about, well, the Supreme Court Of The US.
Used interchanably with the less popular USSC and SCUS acronyms. Additionally, some people call them "God", but that usage is generally only used by people who are attempting to get clerkships.
You posit as fact that child molestors are mentally ill, and therefor should be treated as a separate class of offenders, due to the fact that they have some "uncontrollable urge" to do what it is they do.
I don't accept that fact, but I'll ignore that for the purpose of this argument. I will also ignore the arguments about when a human can or should be able to claim they are ready to have sex.
Remember that states, at various times, have decided that various racial groups, those who adhere to a specific sect, those who happen to hold a particular political belief, or even those who happen to favor a particular manufacturer of goods have been held to the same standards - namely, that they are unable to behave otherwise, and so need to be [forced to do what is right, owned by "real" people, relocated to far off places, killed].
You even hint at the problem when you mention the ACLU persecuting conservatives. You appear to recognize the problem.
So what is it - should those who have done time be free when they get out, or not? If not, what about the rest of us? Shouldn't we we monitored, just in case? Or do you believe that a given proclivity somehow makes someone less than human, therfore not subject to the legal rights of the rest of us? Please, choose. I'm sure the response will be amusing.
My base argument is this: if you commit a crime, you are responsible to make good on that, as defined by the state. When you are done making restitution, you are no longer a ward of the state.
Any different interpretation allows all number of incursions into the private life of everyone.
If one accepts your postulate, that child molesters are incapable of not molesting children, than the only rational behaviour on the part of the state is to kill them, as they are not capable of taking part in society as the state defines it. I don't accept that line or reasoning, but it is at least coherent. Exiting someone from incarceration, but requiring them to [fill in the blank] is not actually discharging them from the legal system. And I promise, these sorts of creeping monitoring _will_ bleed in to other offenses. Drunk driving? Habitual violence? Tax avoidance?
(I have deeper questions about state punishment, but those arguments above are enough for the conversation at hand. I'm only throwing this note out so that folks don't think I actually support everything I say above - there's rhetoric about.)
Re:RTFA... old technology
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RFID Hell
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This is not a slippery slope or anything like that.
This is an incorrect assertion.
It assumes that legislation that limits the liberty of [insert class of people who are nearly universally reviled] will not be applied incrementally to [insert class of people who are only slightly less universally reviled].
Arguing slippery slopes is a very slippery thing indeed; there are many problems, even though the base argument is sound. Which is why I am an absolutist when it comes to crime and punishment issues. Either you're being punished for a crime, or you're not. If you're not, you should be as free as anyone else. Megan's law, or bracelets that phone the cops if you're near a school, or surveillance cameras "just in case", are all tools that blur the line between a free society and a police state.
You're conflating about 5 different issues and arguing everything poorly. I think this is a shame, because at least a couple of those issues deserve attention. If you'd shut up and think, for once, you might make more sense.
That said, A couple of points.
Municipal broadband isn't actually that bad of an idea. If you think phones make sense, bandwidth to houses might, too (I'm thinking of Universal Access here.)
The parent clearly has no idea what actually happened in California wrt power. Nice, pat answers like those offered are exactly what CA doesn't need. (I was a resident for almost 10 years, and left. I'm familiar with CA's dumbshit behaviour.)
I do agree that WiFi should set us free.
What, exactly, that has to do with AT&T, Time/Warner, etc. is beyond me. And all the other stuff, yeah, right on. Dude.
Make sense. It helps the case you're attempting to make.
I tried a HTML::Mason product _with_ mod_perl [...]. It was horrible slow in processing.
I dunno. Sounds like a misconfiguration, but I can't say. You don't provide anything relevant to guess at. I'd suggest you contact the Mason mailing list to figure out what's wrong.
I can say we have sites deployed under Mason with multi-million pageviews a day (more than one server, yes, but nothing excessive).
For presentation abstraction, HTML::Mason is, for me at least, unbeatable. I've worked with a lot of CMS/web app frameworks (from homegrown to classic MVC through various OS frameworks to various commercial ones (Interwoven, Vingette ), and I've found Mason just rocks. For folks that prefer other models and like Perl, there's EMBPerl and Template::Toolkit, which I believe/. uses (and it is faster, performance-wise, than Mason, too.)
There is very, very little perl in our presentation layer. The only place you'll find it is the same place you'll find something verysimilar in other languages/frameworks, for things like looping over returned values, changing presentation based on the user, or, in some cases, as Mason specific components; for instance (autohandlers, in the lingo) for controlling classes of pages, or (in the case of dhandlers) drop in components for doing things like resizing a directory of images on the fly and caching the new size, or rendering pages as PDF, or XML, or CSV, or...
Also, as I said, many people don't like perl - they find it, as you said, cryptic. That's religious, and I won't argue it, aside from to say I personally don't find that at all. Everyone likes something different. The handcuffs Java requires drive me nuts (Date formatting, anyone? Factory Factories?). I will give you that a newby or lousy coder can probably write obfuscated perl faster than they can obfuscated Java. I've taken over projects with some truly fucking _ugly_ Java, though, so don't doubt that people do it. And just go peruse Freshmeat PHP code. There's a lot of truly exemplary cases of Code To Scream By there, just waiting for a harried admin to install, become dependent on, and then have to modify...
I personally believe that the language doesn't matter when talking about maintainability; the coder does (modulo things like BrainF*ck and Intercal). Perl by a good coder can read almost like English. Ours doesn't; we're heavily OO and our web-related libraries are influenced heavily by the DOM. As a data point, we contracted a Java coder who (after picking up Perlisms in an afternoon), figured out what was going in the application in question on very quickly - the time between hire and productive code for her was about a week. Try that in a Java or C shop. (Granted, she's a really smart gal. Hi, Antonia!)
I'm not sure what you're getting at about integration with other languages. I'm probably misunderstaing what you're getting at, but it integrates well with just about everything I've ever tried. C is no problem, Perl actually uses TCL for TK, SQL is handled just fine, I know there are glue packages for Python, Ruby, Java and others, there are CPAN modules for ASP, and probably things I'm missing. There's Web Services(tm) for everything else. And Parrot wight change the landscape again, when it is done, although that remains to be seen.
Code in what makes you happy.
tell me currently one far better system to program web-application with.
Perl, baby.
I don't want to turn things religious, so here are concrete reasons why we use perl in almost all cases (we're a small development/business consulting firm):
- Rapid development
We can bang out the shell of a new web application in an afternoon, including (depending on what the app actually is) session handling, security model, shopping cart, workflow, revision history, etc. This includes the interface.
- Speed
mod_perl rocks. In the rare case when something is actually slow in perl, we either (depending on what's appropriate) write a database extension in a procedural language (if the issue is speed, usually C), or a perl XS extension. But this rarely happens.
- CPAN
The mistake I make the most when coding is rewriting something that is already on CPAN. Enough said.
- Text processing
I know of no other language that supports text processing more naturally than Perl. The way regexes are an inherent part of the language rather than a bolted-on extension makes me want to chew my arm off when I am using them in another language. And what is web programming, other than overglorified text processing?
- HTML::Mason
The nicest web application framework I've ever worked with. The development model and application flow is incredibly well thought out. The little "gotchas" wherein one has to do something strange are orders of magnitude fewer than every other framework I've worked with.
Downsides:
- Business doesn't afford Perl the same respect that it does Java.
True, to some extent. We do Java work as well, and have converted some customers to Perl when they approach large transitions, once they see the cost savings and the fact that there's no real downside. And small business is extremely receptive, especially to the cost factor.
- Many people don't like Perl.
Religious issue. Sure, it is possible to write unmaintainable perl. [insert I can do that in any language here.] My personal opinion, when looking at a lot of PHP out there, is that the slightly lower barrier to entry causes a lot of truly horrible PHP to be distributed - the ugly code factor is as easy to get in PHP as it is in Perl. And don't get me started on some of the JSP I've seen... I can't speak for other shops, but we keep a clean separation between library code and interface code, and come back to projects we did years ago when someone wants a change with little difficulty.
- Market share
Perl isn't the front runner. So what? It has a strong, vibrant and helpful community, there's plenty of documentation, and it sure as hell isn't dying. If other people don't get the faith, that's a market advantage for me...
- Doesn't enforce large development environment practices
Correct. It certainly does support them, but they are not enforced to the extent they are in other languages. For some, this is a downside. For me, this just means the language scales from a two minute script to save repetitive labor up through massive projects. If a coder can't follow architectural practices defined by the company, that's not the language's fault. And PHP certainly doesn't, either.
In any case, this rant went longer than I intended. I say, use whatever you like. Different minds work in different ways. Remember that paper (I forget who wrote it) about the huge market advantage web programming in Lisp gave his company?
JG Twenty-megabyte disks were considered giant. I believe that the first time I asked anybody, about 1970, disk storage rented for a dollar per megabyte a month. IBM leased rather than sold storage at the time. Each disk was the size of a washing machine and cost around $20,000.
So, one could rent a $20K device for $240/year? Those must have been the days...
Indexing a bunch of MP3s is a much, much simpler problem.
You aren't being creative enough.
Why wouldn't Google leverage what they know about the web onto MP3s for recommendations? There are lots of people out there with a page listing a bunch of bands they like
Not sure what is currently happening with CF these days.
I evaluated it for a company I used to work at, and couldn't find a reason to use it. The libraries were spagetti - we had on of their trainers come in and give us a weeklong development course, and he didn't know half of what was going on. The code paths were impossible to trace. And it was expensive. I was not impressed.
Fusebox is an OK methodology, I suppose. If you do a lot of web development, I think you end up with your own framework at some point.
I would have to agree you don't see much perl in web applications any longer.
Hugh. Odd. I'm seeing it more and more.
mod_perl/Mason just took over Amazon. I see lots of signs of perl all over the web - basically anyone who doesn't drink MS koolaid and isn't into Java for whatever reason is using Perl. There's a huge hobbyist contingent that likes PHP, because it is a little easier to get started with for http related stuff, and companies like Yahoo whom for whatever reason went with it. (I'm not dissing PHP - if that's your thing, run with it.)
I still write a lot of software on web platforms for people. Most of it is Perl (some of it is C, and there's plpgsql or a similar DB language, and Javascript, and when I really have to, VB or some other MS language. Oh, and I have two Java clients.) - in fact, I'd say that ~95% of what I do is Perl, outside of database work. Sometimes you patch something or speed something up with C, and sometimes you have to deal with something else.
You could start with the perl-ldap page, for perl. I'm sure Python has similar, but I don't swing that way. Speaking of swing, as you note, Java is not really what you want here, unless you fit a very particular box.
In any case, even Perl's too much for you - why would you write your own gateway when the vast majority of the work has been done for you?
I wonder why OpenLDAP is something that you don't want? Resource-wise, unless you're handling a _lot_ of clients or a really pathological schema behind it, you shouldn't have any problems. In terms of administration, it really does mostly run itself. Setup the initial gateway, and you're done, other than having one more service to watch.
I don't know of any simpler solutions, other than "don't use it, then". Maybe I'm misunderstanding.
I do know a lot of people break out into hives when confronted with LDAP. Most of those people don't have much of a background in the theory behind it. I seriously don't mean this as a put-down - I don't have a formal background in the theory, either. All I mean is that it really isn't all that scary once you start doing it. Again, maybe I'm missing the problem.
Exactly what is your self-justification to assume knowledge, and then proceed to insult those assumptions, of my opinion on abortion, or my religious beliefs, or my moral views - from a discussion of collecting taxes and deficit spending? Aren't those rather personal beliefs - or are you a libertartian only when convenient to your argument?
I think if you look carefully at what I wrote, you will find that I made no assertions about anything on your behalf. Any insult you inferred is your own business. Indeed, I only made an assertion that I considered consistent with your previous comments.
I'll wait... go look.
Done yet?
you don't see cash-in-hand for any program that stretches out over more than one year - you don't even see the cash in hand for the money that was collected under the fraudulent concept of "we'll hold it for you for your own good of social-security", do you?
You're barely making sense, but I'll try. I know of farm programs that pay people not to grow tobacco, because the USG has too much to sell on the open market without depressing prices. I know this has been the case since at least the 1970's; I can go look up legislation to back this, but it probably is futile to discuss with you. I know of many multiyear programs to do many things. Are you depending on the budget that Congress approves every year for your chain of reasoning? Talk about a tenuous line...
Looking back at the "debate" the other night (more like a public opportunity for Al Sharpton to[...]
OK, I have no idea what they hell you're ranting about now. Have a great time doing it - don't let me stop you. There are a lot of fun people out there on street corners. If you want to come back and play at some point, you might want to discuss the original issue I called you to task over, which was my disagreement with the theory that personal debt=liability, government debt=sound policy.
And yes, I trolled you with the abortion thing. Looks like I won.
Currently, the anonymity you have on the web is the only thing protecting you from all the crazies out there.
(1) You are not anonymous on the net, unless you work fairly hard at assuring that you are.
(1a) The net is not the web.
(2) "all the crazies" are your neighbors. Perhaps your loved ones. Deal.
Giving the money back to those to whom it belongs to (the taxpayer) fits right in with the concept of personal responsibility - the belief is that you know far better how to spend your money than the government
Right. I agree. People who earn money should be responsible for spending it. Easy enough.
As for the deficit - it's just like never being able to default on that student loan (damn, there's that responsibility thing again). By pushing the payment of government services into the future (that is, via deficit spending), one can make sure that future spenders have less wiggle room to spend frivolously - they will be held much closer to having to spend conservatively - the voters will less tolerate the purchase of non-essential things.
So... people who take a loan should be responsible for it...
...unless they are a government. If the Government spends money they don't have, that's OK, they're just enslaving future children. That's becuase, well, they can't go bankrupt, they're the government. They can tax the hell out of as-yet-unborn people to make up for whatever stupid idea is getting someone elected today.
Anyone here the noise of Samual Adams spinning in his grave? Hell, England had the decency to only tax the currently living. And I think I hear Mussolini ranting about the railroads somewhere off in the distance...
If this is the scheme, you should be opposing abortion because it deprives the state of future taxpayers, not on religious or moral grounds.
Damn, that is about the dumbest explanation of statist behaviour I've heard in a while, but it does explain a lot of current policy from the Dubya regime.
And I'm a fairly right-wing libertarian, on a lot of issues. (and for the record, I'm pro- right to choose.)
I think we're very close to agreeing to disagree, but a couple of points:
How so? The whole point of the fund for victims was that the government pays restitution in exchange for the victims waiving their right to sue anyone other than the terrorists. Seems to me that this is designed to cut the lawyers out of the loop.
All I can say is I don't think you've been watching closely. Laywers are nearly the only people benefiting ( and I say this as someone who has a perverse desire towards law ) .
As Hobbes wrote, life before civilization tended to be "solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short."
Getting into a heavy philosophical debate on slashdot is a bad idea, (tm), so I'm going to mostly beg out. I generally don't buy the Hobbsean notion of the nation state as benefactor, mostly because there's so much prior art to the contrary. I'll stop right there, because I said it was a bad idea (damn liberal arts education, making me wanna rant...)
I doubt that you would assert that nobody has an entitlement to any help when he suffers a misfortune nor would I assert that somebody has an entitlement to infinite recompense.
You are incorrect here. I would, and do, assert that there is not entitlement to anything more than one can provide for one's self. I, personally, have been helped a lot, a great deal, by a number of people. Sometimes that was the state. I'm very greatful for that, and when someone near me needs help, I do what I can. I don't understand how this becomes an entitlement. I own what I can make, or convince others to give me.
Remember that government is your neighbors. What, exactly, do they owe you? What do you owe them? I would encourage you to think heavily about what, exactly, the folks living around you can expect from you. Oh, that isn't what you meant?...
To use your examples, police have been nearly completely useless for me ( though there's one time that a cop gave me a ride home after my car broke down, and a good friend of my mother's is a cop ), and I'm most familiar with firemen in the context of small town extortion ( who knows? your place could catch of fire. Don't you want us to be there for you? How much can I put you down for? ) I don't dislike cops, or fire department workers, but they just work a job. That it might help you at some point is almost beside the point.
I then contrast this with being mugged, having my car stolen, and going through a house fire. I'm not bitter. I expect the general behaviour I recieved, and all is well. I just don't understand why others expect more. ( I understand a desire for a perfect world where there is more, I just don't think we're ever going to approach it ) .
We've moved quite far from the original assertion, which was that somehow a software developer should pay money to people shot by a couple of bored rednecks. I just don't get that.
I know I'm not going to convice you, so I'm going to beg off here. I'll leave with the general assertion:
Life is hard.
Others add to that, with " then you die ", various sexual jokes, and some reasonable allusions to how to make it better. I like to think that the best ending to that statement is " and that makes you learn how to live " . Color me sappy.
Slashdot Mirror
What happens is that if you fail to listen to your Primary Domain Controller, the Bondage and Discipline Cop steps in to beat and humiliate you until you submit creditentials to the proper authorities. Usually, this happens when you're standing in front of many people and attempting to get at Powerpoint slides you left on your client machine.
The most obvious form of this sort of thing is sampling - think Queen bass lines and huge parachute pants.
Quake used a lot of effects very similar to Nine Inch Nails songs (which isn't very surprising, considering Trent Reznor worked on sound effects).
Other artists reuse or contstruct sound-alikes for artistic nods, as you mention. It also is done to suggest irony or absurdist humor (think slide whistles and cartonny-spring "boing" noises). It can be really subtle, or it can be a Malcolm in the Middle episode. Or it can be a Simpsons episode - it never fails to amaze me that a lot of people miss so many of the not-so-subtle references they make. (Then again, I'm sure I miss some, too.)
If pictures tell a kiloword, a good sound effect can instill a single, hard to describe sensation of placement in a very different environment than a movie theater or desk chair.
All of which brings me back to my original point. If you're making a game, it could be that generic "bonk", "splat", "wonk-wonk" noises are all you need if you're cloning a game or doing something derivative or ironic. If you're attempting to do something original, you need to think a little harder about it, and maybe hang out with a local musician or sound engineer for a while.
This sort of thing is not similar to OS development - it is more of an art form. Clip art might be something that could be open source, but good art will never be. Sound design is much closer to art than coding.
Before you disagree, think about good code being usable in as many places as possible, and then think about whether sound effects for your favorite movie or game can be leveraged into every other movie or game and give you the same feeling.
Many people could produce random noises, but there's no point. "Here's a game over sound. I think it works for most every game I've played, so I'm releasing it."
That's a pretty old comparison; both PG and Mysql have changed a lot since then.
Common acronym used by people who talk about, well, the Supreme Court Of The US.
Used interchanably with the less popular USSC and SCUS acronyms. Additionally, some people call them "God", but that usage is generally only used by people who are attempting to get clerkships.
I don't accept that fact, but I'll ignore that for the purpose of this argument. I will also ignore the arguments about when a human can or should be able to claim they are ready to have sex.
Remember that states, at various times, have decided that various racial groups, those who adhere to a specific sect, those who happen to hold a particular political belief, or even those who happen to favor a particular manufacturer of goods have been held to the same standards - namely, that they are unable to behave otherwise, and so need to be [forced to do what is right, owned by "real" people, relocated to far off places, killed].
You even hint at the problem when you mention the ACLU persecuting conservatives. You appear to recognize the problem.
So what is it - should those who have done time be free when they get out, or not? If not, what about the rest of us? Shouldn't we we monitored, just in case? Or do you believe that a given proclivity somehow makes someone less than human, therfore not subject to the legal rights of the rest of us? Please, choose. I'm sure the response will be amusing.
My base argument is this: if you commit a crime, you are responsible to make good on that, as defined by the state. When you are done making restitution, you are no longer a ward of the state. Any different interpretation allows all number of incursions into the private life of everyone.
If one accepts your postulate, that child molesters are incapable of not molesting children, than the only rational behaviour on the part of the state is to kill them, as they are not capable of taking part in society as the state defines it. I don't accept that line or reasoning, but it is at least coherent. Exiting someone from incarceration, but requiring them to [fill in the blank] is not actually discharging them from the legal system. And I promise, these sorts of creeping monitoring _will_ bleed in to other offenses. Drunk driving? Habitual violence? Tax avoidance?
(I have deeper questions about state punishment, but those arguments above are enough for the conversation at hand. I'm only throwing this note out so that folks don't think I actually support everything I say above - there's rhetoric about.)
Mason does not use Amazon. But Amazon does use Mason.
http://www.masonhq.com/about/sites.html
This is an incorrect assertion.
It assumes that legislation that limits the liberty of [insert class of people who are nearly universally reviled] will not be applied incrementally to [insert class of people who are only slightly less universally reviled].
Arguing slippery slopes is a very slippery thing indeed; there are many problems, even though the base argument is sound. Which is why I am an absolutist when it comes to crime and punishment issues. Either you're being punished for a crime, or you're not. If you're not, you should be as free as anyone else. Megan's law, or bracelets that phone the cops if you're near a school, or surveillance cameras "just in case", are all tools that blur the line between a free society and a police state.
That said, A couple of points.
Municipal broadband isn't actually that bad of an idea. If you think phones make sense, bandwidth to houses might, too (I'm thinking of Universal Access here.)
The parent clearly has no idea what actually happened in California wrt power. Nice, pat answers like those offered are exactly what CA doesn't need. (I was a resident for almost 10 years, and left. I'm familiar with CA's dumbshit behaviour.)
I do agree that WiFi should set us free.
What, exactly, that has to do with AT&T, Time/Warner, etc. is beyond me. And all the other stuff, yeah, right on. Dude.
Make sense. It helps the case you're attempting to make.
I wasn't picking the right terms when searching on it.
I dunno. Sounds like a misconfiguration, but I can't say. You don't provide anything relevant to guess at. I'd suggest you contact the Mason mailing list to figure out what's wrong.
I can say we have sites deployed under Mason with multi-million pageviews a day (more than one server, yes, but nothing excessive).
With modern machines, Mason is fine. Ask Amazon.
For presentation abstraction, HTML::Mason is, for me at least, unbeatable. I've worked with a lot of CMS/web app frameworks (from homegrown to classic MVC through various OS frameworks to various commercial ones (Interwoven, Vingette ), and I've found Mason just rocks. For folks that prefer other models and like Perl, there's EMBPerl and Template::Toolkit, which I believe /. uses (and it is faster, performance-wise, than Mason, too.)
There is very, very little perl in our presentation layer. The only place you'll find it is the same place you'll find something verysimilar in other languages/frameworks, for things like looping over returned values, changing presentation based on the user, or, in some cases, as Mason specific components; for instance (autohandlers, in the lingo) for controlling classes of pages, or (in the case of dhandlers) drop in components for doing things like resizing a directory of images on the fly and caching the new size, or rendering pages as PDF, or XML, or CSV, or...
Also, as I said, many people don't like perl - they find it, as you said, cryptic. That's religious, and I won't argue it, aside from to say I personally don't find that at all. Everyone likes something different. The handcuffs Java requires drive me nuts (Date formatting, anyone? Factory Factories?). I will give you that a newby or lousy coder can probably write obfuscated perl faster than they can obfuscated Java. I've taken over projects with some truly fucking _ugly_ Java, though, so don't doubt that people do it. And just go peruse Freshmeat PHP code. There's a lot of truly exemplary cases of Code To Scream By there, just waiting for a harried admin to install, become dependent on, and then have to modify...
I personally believe that the language doesn't matter when talking about maintainability; the coder does (modulo things like BrainF*ck and Intercal). Perl by a good coder can read almost like English. Ours doesn't; we're heavily OO and our web-related libraries are influenced heavily by the DOM. As a data point, we contracted a Java coder who (after picking up Perlisms in an afternoon), figured out what was going in the application in question on very quickly - the time between hire and productive code for her was about a week. Try that in a Java or C shop. (Granted, she's a really smart gal. Hi, Antonia!)
I'm not sure what you're getting at about integration with other languages. I'm probably misunderstaing what you're getting at, but it integrates well with just about everything I've ever tried. C is no problem, Perl actually uses TCL for TK, SQL is handled just fine, I know there are glue packages for Python, Ruby, Java and others, there are CPAN modules for ASP, and probably things I'm missing. There's Web Services(tm) for everything else. And Parrot wight change the landscape again, when it is done, although that remains to be seen. Code in what makes you happy.
Perl, baby.
I don't want to turn things religious, so here are concrete reasons why we use perl in almost all cases (we're a small development/business consulting firm):
- Rapid development
We can bang out the shell of a new web application in an afternoon, including (depending on what the app actually is) session handling, security model, shopping cart, workflow, revision history, etc. This includes the interface.
- Speed
mod_perl rocks. In the rare case when something is actually slow in perl, we either (depending on what's appropriate) write a database extension in a procedural language (if the issue is speed, usually C), or a perl XS extension. But this rarely happens.
- CPAN
The mistake I make the most when coding is rewriting something that is already on CPAN. Enough said.
- Text processing
I know of no other language that supports text processing more naturally than Perl. The way regexes are an inherent part of the language rather than a bolted-on extension makes me want to chew my arm off when I am using them in another language. And what is web programming, other than overglorified text processing?
- HTML::Mason
The nicest web application framework I've ever worked with. The development model and application flow is incredibly well thought out. The little "gotchas" wherein one has to do something strange are orders of magnitude fewer than every other framework I've worked with.
Downsides:
- Business doesn't afford Perl the same respect that it does Java.
True, to some extent. We do Java work as well, and have converted some customers to Perl when they approach large transitions, once they see the cost savings and the fact that there's no real downside. And small business is extremely receptive, especially to the cost factor.
- Many people don't like Perl.
Religious issue. Sure, it is possible to write unmaintainable perl. [insert I can do that in any language here.] My personal opinion, when looking at a lot of PHP out there, is that the slightly lower barrier to entry causes a lot of truly horrible PHP to be distributed - the ugly code factor is as easy to get in PHP as it is in Perl. And don't get me started on some of the JSP I've seen... I can't speak for other shops, but we keep a clean separation between library code and interface code, and come back to projects we did years ago when someone wants a change with little difficulty.
- Market share
Perl isn't the front runner. So what? It has a strong, vibrant and helpful community, there's plenty of documentation, and it sure as hell isn't dying. If other people don't get the faith, that's a market advantage for me...
- Doesn't enforce large development environment practices
Correct. It certainly does support them, but they are not enforced to the extent they are in other languages. For some, this is a downside. For me, this just means the language scales from a two minute script to save repetitive labor up through massive projects. If a coder can't follow architectural practices defined by the company, that's not the language's fault. And PHP certainly doesn't, either.
In any case, this rant went longer than I intended. I say, use whatever you like. Different minds work in different ways. Remember that paper (I forget who wrote it) about the huge market advantage web programming in Lisp gave his company?
So, one could rent a $20K device for $240/year? Those must have been the days...
That can't be right.
Sorry about that. Kaplan deserves some bashing, too, though.
Erm, the current poll is for Mitch Kaplan, of Etrade...
You aren't being creative enough.
Why wouldn't Google leverage what they know about the web onto MP3s for recommendations? There are lots of people out there with a page listing a bunch of bands they like
That's just for starters.
I evaluated it for a company I used to work at, and couldn't find a reason to use it. The libraries were spagetti - we had on of their trainers come in and give us a weeklong development course, and he didn't know half of what was going on. The code paths were impossible to trace. And it was expensive. I was not impressed.
Fusebox is an OK methodology, I suppose. If you do a lot of web development, I think you end up with your own framework at some point.
Hugh. Odd. I'm seeing it more and more.
mod_perl/Mason just took over Amazon. I see lots of signs of perl all over the web - basically anyone who doesn't drink MS koolaid and isn't into Java for whatever reason is using Perl. There's a huge hobbyist contingent that likes PHP, because it is a little easier to get started with for http related stuff, and companies like Yahoo whom for whatever reason went with it. (I'm not dissing PHP - if that's your thing, run with it.)
I still write a lot of software on web platforms for people. Most of it is Perl (some of it is C, and there's plpgsql or a similar DB language, and Javascript, and when I really have to, VB or some other MS language. Oh, and I have two Java clients.) - in fact, I'd say that ~95% of what I do is Perl, outside of database work. Sometimes you patch something or speed something up with C, and sometimes you have to deal with something else.
In any case, even Perl's too much for you - why would you write your own gateway when the vast majority of the work has been done for you? I wonder why OpenLDAP is something that you don't want? Resource-wise, unless you're handling a _lot_ of clients or a really pathological schema behind it, you shouldn't have any problems. In terms of administration, it really does mostly run itself. Setup the initial gateway, and you're done, other than having one more service to watch.
I don't know of any simpler solutions, other than "don't use it, then". Maybe I'm misunderstanding.
I do know a lot of people break out into hives when confronted with LDAP. Most of those people don't have much of a background in the theory behind it. I seriously don't mean this as a put-down - I don't have a formal background in the theory, either. All I mean is that it really isn't all that scary once you start doing it. Again, maybe I'm missing the problem.
Hope this does someone some good.
I think if you look carefully at what I wrote, you will find that I made no assertions about anything on your behalf. Any insult you inferred is your own business. Indeed, I only made an assertion that I considered consistent with your previous comments.
I'll wait... go look.
Done yet?
you don't see cash-in-hand for any program that stretches out over more than one year - you don't even see the cash in hand for the money that was collected under the fraudulent concept of "we'll hold it for you for your own good of social-security", do you?
You're barely making sense, but I'll try. I know of farm programs that pay people not to grow tobacco, because the USG has too much to sell on the open market without depressing prices. I know this has been the case since at least the 1970's; I can go look up legislation to back this, but it probably is futile to discuss with you. I know of many multiyear programs to do many things. Are you depending on the budget that Congress approves every year for your chain of reasoning? Talk about a tenuous line...
Looking back at the "debate" the other night (more like a public opportunity for Al Sharpton to[...]
OK, I have no idea what they hell you're ranting about now. Have a great time doing it - don't let me stop you. There are a lot of fun people out there on street corners. If you want to come back and play at some point, you might want to discuss the original issue I called you to task over, which was my disagreement with the theory that personal debt=liability, government debt=sound policy.
And yes, I trolled you with the abortion thing. Looks like I won.
Spoke like a true patriot.
(1) You are not anonymous on the net, unless you work fairly hard at assuring that you are.
(1a) The net is not the web.
(2) "all the crazies" are your neighbors. Perhaps your loved ones. Deal.
Right. I agree. People who earn money should be responsible for spending it. Easy enough.
As for the deficit - it's just like never being able to default on that student loan (damn, there's that responsibility thing again). By pushing the payment of government services into the future (that is, via deficit spending), one can make sure that future spenders have less wiggle room to spend frivolously - they will be held much closer to having to spend conservatively - the voters will less tolerate the purchase of non-essential things.
So... people who take a loan should be responsible for it...
Anyone here the noise of Samual Adams spinning in his grave? Hell, England had the decency to only tax the currently living. And I think I hear Mussolini ranting about the railroads somewhere off in the distance...
If this is the scheme, you should be opposing abortion because it deprives the state of future taxpayers, not on religious or moral grounds.
Damn, that is about the dumbest explanation of statist behaviour I've heard in a while, but it does explain a lot of current policy from the Dubya regime.
And I'm a fairly right-wing libertarian, on a lot of issues. (and for the record, I'm pro- right to choose.)
How so? The whole point of the fund for victims was that the government pays restitution in exchange for the victims waiving their right to sue anyone other than the terrorists. Seems to me that this is designed to cut the lawyers out of the loop.
All I can say is I don't think you've been watching closely. Laywers are nearly the only people benefiting ( and I say this as someone who has a perverse desire towards law ) .
As Hobbes wrote, life before civilization tended to be "solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short."
Getting into a heavy philosophical debate on slashdot is a bad idea, (tm), so I'm going to mostly beg out. I generally don't buy the Hobbsean notion of the nation state as benefactor, mostly because there's so much prior art to the contrary. I'll stop right there, because I said it was a bad idea (damn liberal arts education, making me wanna rant...)
I doubt that you would assert that nobody has an entitlement to any help when he suffers a misfortune nor would I assert that somebody has an entitlement to infinite recompense.
You are incorrect here. I would, and do, assert that there is not entitlement to anything more than one can provide for one's self. I, personally, have been helped a lot, a great deal, by a number of people. Sometimes that was the state. I'm very greatful for that, and when someone near me needs help, I do what I can. I don't understand how this becomes an entitlement. I own what I can make, or convince others to give me.
Remember that government is your neighbors. What, exactly, do they owe you? What do you owe them? I would encourage you to think heavily about what, exactly, the folks living around you can expect from you. Oh, that isn't what you meant?...
To use your examples, police have been nearly completely useless for me ( though there's one time that a cop gave me a ride home after my car broke down, and a good friend of my mother's is a cop ), and I'm most familiar with firemen in the context of small town extortion ( who knows? your place could catch of fire. Don't you want us to be there for you? How much can I put you down for? ) I don't dislike cops, or fire department workers, but they just work a job. That it might help you at some point is almost beside the point.
I then contrast this with being mugged, having my car stolen, and going through a house fire. I'm not bitter. I expect the general behaviour I recieved, and all is well. I just don't understand why others expect more. ( I understand a desire for a perfect world where there is more, I just don't think we're ever going to approach it ) . We've moved quite far from the original assertion, which was that somehow a software developer should pay money to people shot by a couple of bored rednecks. I just don't get that. I know I'm not going to convice you, so I'm going to beg off here. I'll leave with the general assertion:
Life is hard.
Others add to that, with " then you die ", various sexual jokes, and some reasonable allusions to how to make it better. I like to think that the best ending to that statement is " and that makes you learn how to live " . Color me sappy.