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All the Perl that's Practical to Extract and Report

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  • hmph (Score:2)

    by gnat (29) on 2002.03.02 4:26 (#5332) Journal
    I think those were my useless bloviations, and I disagree that they were useless. We argued about this, Tom and I, when we rewrote the FAQ. I argued for just pointing to modules. He argued, convincingly, that that's not teaching people how to fish, that's just giving them a Fish McButtplugget.

    "Read the file, write a temporary file reflecting your change, move temp file over original file" is a classic programming idiom, and any programmer worth his or her salt needs to know that. By all means point them to File::Tie, but don't rob them of the chance to acquire clue that will make them better programmers.

    Whining ends.

    --Nat

    • The question is whether the purpose of a FAQ is to teach people to fish. I don't think it is. I think I can safely say that I'm a programming geek, and I still think just handing out Fish McButtpluggets is fine. Most people should never be sent out to the Beringian see in trawlers: it's the deadliest profession in the world.
       
      • Agreed; the FAQ is primarily for use by people who are just going to use the easy answer anyway. They can purchase the Cookbook for a more in-depth response, or we can spinoff a larger FMTYEWTK series ...
    • You wrote that? I'd swear that it was classic Tomic tone, especially here:
      ...those are operations of a text editor. Perl is not a text editor. Perl is a programming language. You have to decompose the problem into low-level calls to read, write, open, close, and seek.
      Might as well just attach "NO, YOU'RE WRONG!!!" to the answer.
      • We might as well throw away the regex engine and tell the users to dust off their discrete math book (and if they don't have one, they obviously are not worthy) and implement the state machine themselves, because what the hell is pattern matching doing in a "programming language".
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