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All the Perl that's Practical to Extract and Report
You can't even think about them!"
--Larry Wall in Configure from the perl distribution
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Confused/confusing (Score:1)
tongue-in-cheek.
He says if you can't say what you are doing in a
sentence, then it is not JFDI. Actually, being
articulate about what you are doing is a sign
that you are not Just Fucking Doing It. You have
thought about what you are doing, rather than
plunged straight in.
Is the essay an expression of the angst of CPAN
authors wondering if their tools are being used?
He seems to be saying that one of the strengths
of perl, its practicalness, is not strong enough.
What evidence
Re:Confused/confusing (Score:2)
Then wonder no more. I was completely serious.
I'm saying that I'm tired of people talking about PHP as the web development languages of choice because they can find any number of ready-rolled applications on the internet that that they can just download and install[1]. And I'm tired of people saying that Ruby on Rails is the next big thing because 37Signals create useful and interesting web applications using it. And most of all I'm tired of hearing Perl programmers bemoaning those first two facts whilst uploading yet another bloody templating system (which no-one will ever use) to CPAN.
But perhaps I'm overreacting.
[1] Yes, you know and I know that many of these applications have huge security holes. But to the people downloading them that doesn't matter. It should matter. But the reality is that it doesn't.
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Interesting/interested (Score:1)
it more than my comment suggests.
JFDI is anti BDUF and similar to YAGNI.
What I like about programming (in perl) is that I
don't have to do the Big Design Up Front. I can
build the program up on the basis of the results
from my half-baked code. I can learn as I go.
That's a bottom-up process.
I don't know why this is an interesting topic to
me. Perhaps because I think about the path to
becoming a CPAN author from the present state of
my code.
an analogy with making plastic utensils (Score:1)
with a manufacturer of rejiggable plastic moulds
who is unhappy about his customers. These
customers are 'happy campers' who are spending
all their time rejigging their moulds, rather
than producing plastic utensils.
Meanwhile, metal and ceramic utensil
manufacturers are producing and selling large
amounts of non-plastic utensils.