Stories
Slash Boxes
Comments
NOTE: use Perl; is on undef hiatus. You can read content, but you can't post it. More info will be forthcoming forthcomingly.

All the Perl that's Practical to Extract and Report

The Fine Print: The following comments are owned by whoever posted them. We are not responsible for them in any way.

Steve Yegge on Dynamic Languages 8 Comments More | Login | Reply /

 Full
 Abbreviated
 Hidden
More | Login | Reply
Loading... please wait.
  • I remember Steve asking a list at work how to do a recursive find/replace on a file tree with Perl since he barely knew a lick of it. He got 3 answers. He picked the worst, most verbose, and hardest to use as the best choice. This was also during a time when Steve's dev group was foisting a horrible Java piece of crap on the customer service department which took 18 months to reach 25% of the coverage of the previous command line C and Perl tools it was supposed to replace; it was also too slow to use half
    --
    -- 120 chars should be all we're allowed for epitaphs as well.

    • He picked the worst, most verbose, and hardest to use as the best choice.

      It is practically impossible to teach good programming to students that have had a prior exposure to Java: as potential programmers they are mentally mutilated beyond hope of regeneration.

      • I think there’s a quote trying to be coined in there. Maybe “Classes are to Java programmers as GOTO is to BASIC kids”? Hm, not catchy enough.

        • Interfaces are to Java what machines are to Rube Goldberg.

        • When the only tool you have is Java, every problem looks like a FactoryFactory.

          • That doesn’t convey the punchy idea that I was hoping to capture, though: that casting every task and problem as a class hierarchy is just as brain-damaged as casting every control flow as IF GOTOs.

            • Ontology recapitulates zymarikology?

              This one goes out to all of the Greek-speaking philosophy-loving ex-biologists in the audience. (I really tried to work the word "contravariance" in there, but yeesh.)

              • LOL!

                You get some bonus points for that. The only problem is almost nobody will know what you’re talking about.

Stories, comments, journals, and other submissions on use Perl; are Copyright 1998-2006, their respective owners.