use Perl

Similar to what I went through around 2005/2006. Except that what ended up deciding was how much more Java programmers were able to make, especially if they sported the magic "J2EE" incantations. Boy, was I wrong. When I first saw EJBs I knew it was time to get a new job.

Hey, I think its a really nice quote; personally I wouldn't use it in my sig - maybe just quote it in my website or something, dunno. I would treasure it just like you did, though.

ucfirst() has been around for ages, afaik. At least a decade, possibly much more.

Why did you quit doing Perl full time? Was it a decision or did the market push you to it? Just curious. Do you actually want to go back to writing Perl full-time?

I am currently doing Objective-C most of the time, and even though I miss some of the ease with which you can process strings in Perl, I'm quite happy with the way things are.

-- ank

LOL!

And you were leaving comments on perl 5 and 6 replying to my criticisms of the language? Maybe its time to change your sig:

"J. David works really hard reimplementing bult-in functions"

Third-rate programmers, unite!

That's funny; I don't remember voting for them.

That's what happens with so-called "benevolent" dictatorships.

Is there something we can do to donate this kindness to another community?

Why exactly does it bother you? Are you afraid I might be right in something? If I'm just a lone nut, what difference does it make what I post?

That is the difference, that you were "denegrating", and jdavidb was using hyperbole to give an exaggerated example of the same thing.

Why? You can either use it or not at all - the context makes no difference. Otherwise, who decides when it can be used? You?

Did I mention multithreading? Or whether or not I've been ignoring it? .oO(Where's the *plonk* button?)

No, I'm just making a comment on one of the many issues related to how Perl is stagnated. Interesting that you chose to ignore it instead of giving it an appropriate response. But hey, that's fanboi-ism, I guess.

Now, this is what I'm talking about. I haven't done PHP in ages, but today I needed to do some quick scripting and I realized there's been a new major release sometime after my last contact with the language. Quick look at new features includes garbage collection for circular references, something that perl still doesn't include.

That makes no difference, on purpose or not. The point is "denigrating serious matters", not "it was on purpose or not."

Wake up, don't allow lwall and friends to lie to you - these guys have been playing us since ~2000... it takes a really big effort to ignore the lack of proper multithreading in perl, its speed or its fugly semantics. And it is an issue. You can continue to ignore it at the peril of your own career.

Sounds to me like the community and the leaders fit together fine

s/the community/what remains of the community/

All that puzzles me is why you'd care to continue to rail against it to no apparent end

Contrarianism, basically - someone has to do it. It usually keeps communities honest - although crying over how much of a troll a particular contrarian is. See Christopher Hitchens, for instance.

Why don't you? Put forth a credible proposal and people will follow.

I will start a programming language eventually; have a few important clients to keep happy at the moment, but I've promised myself I'd do it.

I will not put forth a proposal for the Perl community, though - they are oblivious to anything that doesn't fit their preconceptions - such as my "preposterous idea" that the number of operators in Perl 6 (and IMHO perl 5 too, but primarily Perl 6) should be minimised. Making Perl 6 for mortals is not one of their priorities.

Why do I think your comment is so funny? It's self-defeating. You accuse my original post of insulting true victims of violence, hence rendering it invalid. But in the same post you introduce rape, making the exact same mistake yourself! If you follow your logic, your post insults true victims of rape. This puts your comment in a funny situation:

If it is valid, then what it says about my post is also valid about yours, hence rendering your comment invalid.

If it isn't valid, then it can be safely ignored.

Hence, your post was an exercise in futility. I also assume you haven't studied Logic? It is, however, cute in its unintended self-reference.

I find your signature extremely funny as well - are you so insecure that you need to advertise how cool you are in a sig?

Think about it, kid. Our Perl community leaders have failed us, and it's up to us to grab the bull by its horns.

Bullshit. You are insulting every victim of true violence, ever.

Hah. This is probably the funniest comment I've read in a long, long time. Thanks for it, you lightened up my morning.

On a more serious note - go rape yourself :D Like Divine in Female Trouble.

Everyone already knows to avoid Damian-ware. Imagine. No one is offended. No one cares.

Great. Can I quote you on that?

To you it's Mrs. Darling.

ank writes "I've been dealing with some delusional people lately, mostly as a side-effect of recent posts I made regarding chromatic, his entourage and Perl 6. This contact has left me wondering over and over - how was it that I used to love the idea of Perl 6 so much? How did I become so disenchanted with it? And ultimately, why is there still people rooting for Perl 6, seemingly oblivious to the defects the project has been dragging with it for more than a decade?

It's actually quite easy to explain. I have always been programming Perl and other languages in parallel, so it wasn't that hard for me to stop believing the idea that Perl 6 was going to be great. I have also changed and evolved as a person and programmer, so I am no longer at the place I was when I used to work for Yahoo! and used Perl on a daily basis, a decade ago.

This is markedly not the position other programmers find themselves in. Fervently believing that Perl 6 will be a good thing for the Perl community and buying O'Reilly reference books for the unfinished language, they simply cannot accept the fact that the whole concept is broken, even after it's been shown to them over and over.

This cognitive disorder is actually very well known, and is called True-believer syndrome. Wikipedia says:

According to The Skeptic's Dictionary, an example of this syndrome is evidenced by an event in 1988, when James Randi, at the request of an Australian news program, coached stage performer José Alvarez to pretend he was channelling a two-thousand-year-old spirit named "Carlos". Even after it was revealed to be a fictional character created by himself and Alvarez, many people continued to believe that "Carlos" was real.[5] Randi commented: "no amount of evidence, no matter how good it is or how much there is of it, is ever going to convince the true believer to the contrary."[9]

This reminds me of Chet Raymo's book "Skeptics and True Believers," which is filled with amusing depictions of True Believers.

Another point is that the few in the know, such as Larry Wall, chromatic, etc are having fun creating their project, and don't really care all that much about how long it takes - it will be done when it's done. So they don't really fit into this group - they are more like the Carlos who show the rest some mysterious cool magic acts that we are supposed to awe at.

"