Official Bored at Work / Off-Topic Chat Thread II

[Armando]

Re: Official Bored at Work / Off-Topic Chat Thread II

Why don't we just rename them Matrix coats? They have little to do with trenches and everything to do with the Matrix these days.

[Yygdrasil]

Re: Official Bored at Work / Off-Topic Chat Thread II

these days.

I liked it the way you wrote it before.

[Armando]

Re: Official Bored at Work / Off-Topic Chat Thread II

You have no evidence of my mistake!

[Yygdrasil]

Re: Official Bored at Work / Off-Topic Chat Thread II

[cidbahamut]

Re: Official Bored at Work / Off-Topic Chat Thread II

I saw it.

[Mhurron]

Re: Official Bored at Work / Off-Topic Chat Thread II

I'm hijacking this thread.
This is the best description of any programming laguage I've ever read. Not that I would know about Perl from firsthand experience, but still.

It is perfectly easy to write clear perl.

[Armando]

Re: Official Bored at Work / Off-Topic Chat Thread II

It is perfectly easy to write clear perl.

For whatever it's worth, this is what the author means by exploded whale guts:

Sadly, Larry focused sooooo hard on Unix integration and string processing that he totally forgot about lists and objects until it was far too late to implement them properly. In fact, a few key mistakes he made early on in Perl's... well, I hesitate to use the word "design" for whale guts, but let's call it Perl's "lifecycle" — those mistakes made it so hard to do lists and objects correctly that Perl has evolved into a genuine Rube Goldberg machine, at least if you want to use lists or objects.

Lists and objects are pretty farging important too, Larry!

Perl can't do lists because Larry made the tragically stupid decision early on to flatten them automatically. So (1, 2, (3, 4)) magically becomes (1, 2, 3, 4). Not that you ever want it to work this way. But Larry happened to be working on some problem for which it was convenient on that particular day, and Perl's data structures have been pure exploded whale ever since.

Now you can't read a book or tutorial or PowerPoint on Perl without spending at least a third of your time learning about "references", which are Larry's pathetic, broken, Goldbergian fix for his list-flattening insanity. But Perl's marketing is so incredibly good that it makes you feel as if references are the best thing that ever happened to you. You can take a reference to anything! It's fun! Smells good, too!

Perl can't do objects because Larry never reeeeally believed in them. Maybe that's OK; I'm still not quite sure if I believe in them either. But then why did he try adding them? Perl's OO is a halfhearted add-on that never caught on with the Perl community. It's just not as inspired as the string-processing or Unix integration stuff.

And of course, Perl has plenty of other crackpot design features. Take its "contexts", for instance, which are a horrid outgrowth of Larry's comical decision to have N variable namespaces, dereferenced by sigils, which he sort of copied from shell-script. In Perl, every operator, every function, every operation in the language behaves randomly in one of six different ways, depending on the current "context". There are no rules or heuristics governing how a particular operation will behave in a given context. You just have to commit it all to memory.

Need an example? Here's one: accessing a hash in a scalar context gives you a string containing a fraction whose numerator is the number of allocated keys, and the denominator is the number of buckets. Whale guts, I'm telling you.

Like I said, though — until recently, nothing could get the job done like Perl could.

Source: Tour de Babel I just found it a humorous description, that's all.

[Mhurron]

Re: Official Bored at Work / Off-Topic Chat Thread II

Well Perl has become known as being incomprehensible, but the truth is that is an issue with the programmer not the language. Perl's syntax isn't any more or less ugly than any other language.

As for the rest of it, seriously that author has some issues.

First, Larry originally wrote what became the Perl language to solve one problem at NASA. He then, being a nice guy, released his work as open source. It solved other peoples problems so eventually a whole language grew up around that.

Objects - basically a new concept outside of academia for the time PERL was created and totally unnecessary for what the original environment was meant to do. They were added as people were using PERL as a quick replacement for a full language as opposed to the sed/awk on steroids that it was first written as. There were a lot of things that were added after the fact because of this.

Now this "(1, 2, (3, 4)) magically becomes (1, 2, 3, 4). Not that you ever want it to work this way" Is just hilarious, since obviously the right thing to do is throw a syntax error and just stop doing anything, which is what most other languages would do.

This '"references", which are Larry's pathetic, broken, Goldbergian fix for his list-flattening insanity' is just total bullshit as references are basically PERL's pointers. References is actually how you would do the above in many languages, they're just a little more transparent in many languages. In Perl you have to say you're talking about the reference to @list by saying \@list.

And this "In Perl, every operator, every function, every operation in the language behaves randomly in one of six different ways, depending on the current "context"." is again more bullshit. It is not random, and it is the whole reason PERL is a dynamic typed language. This is like bitching about cars having an engine.

[Armando]

Re: Official Bored at Work / Off-Topic Chat Thread II

The Flintstones - Seth MacFarlane - Wikipedia

I'm probably late to the party, but fuck my life.

[Murphie]

Re: Official Bored at Work / Off-Topic Chat Thread II

Jesus.

[Mhurron]

Re: Official Bored at Work / Off-Topic Chat Thread II

Ok, I'll put $40 down as a beginning of a fund to hire a hitman to take out Seth MacFarlane.

[Armando]

Re: Official Bored at Work / Off-Topic Chat Thread II

On the morning of September 11, 2001, MacFarlane was scheduled to return to Los Angeles on American Airlines Flight 11 from Boston, Massachusetts. Suffering from a hangover from the previous night's celebrations,[109] and with an incorrect departure time (8:15 a.m. instead of 7:45 a.m.) from his travel agent,[110] he arrived at Logan International Airport about ten minutes too late to board the flight as the gates had been closed.[110] Fifteen minutes after departure, American Airlines Flight 11 was hijacked,[111] and at 8:46 a.m. was flown into the North Tower of the World Trade Center, obliterating the airplane, and killing everyone on board.[112]

Huh.

[Yygdrasil]

Re: Official Bored at Work / Off-Topic Chat Thread II

If that is a true thing.. and I don't think it is... then I was within 25 yards of Seth MacFarlane once.

[Armando]

Re: Official Bored at Work / Off-Topic Chat Thread II

If that is a true thing.. and I don't think it is...

By Murphie's Law, it will be a real thing.

[Murphie]

Re: Official Bored at Work / Off-Topic Chat Thread II

>.>