"Perl has been pretty much forgotten" says Spolsky
Ben Bullock
on Perl:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NWHfY_lvKIQ
(fast forward to segment from 39:10 to 39:25)
[This statement is not too surprising considering the general level of
stackoverflow.com.]
Charlton Wilbur
BB> In case anyone's interested, this is Joel Spolsky of
BB> stackoverflow.com on Perl:
BB> http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NWHfY_lvKIQ
BB> (fast forward to segment from 39:10 to 39:25)
BB> [This statement is not too surprising considering the general
BB> level of stackoverflow.com.]
Joel Spolsky is a troll. He occasionally says something of value, but
then, a stopped clock is right twice a day.
Charlton
--
Charlton Wilbur
cwi...@chromatico.net
ccc31807
> Joel Spolsky is a troll. He occasionally says something of value, but
> then, a stopped clock is right twice a day.
Joel might be a troll, but I've gotten a lot out of his writings. I
think they are pretty good, and I like to go to his site and read his
essays (On Software) from time to time.
I agree that Perl has been mostly forgotten by the world at large, but
I don't think that's the important point. I've had two experiences in
the last four weeks, introducing Perl (or rather, Perl apps) to IT
guys who came into the conversation expressing a lot of skepticism
about Perl. However, after looking at the code and comparing it head
to head in one case with the identical app written in Java, they had
to admit that Perl was a legitimate tool for some jobs.
One poster here (I think it was Uri but I might be mistaken) recently
observed that Perl was still the best at its original purpose,
extracting and reporting data. If many have forgotten Perl or never
knew it in the first place, it's because they apparently don't have a
need to extract or report data. This isn't a criticism, merely a
statement that people don't normally use tools that they don't need.
I read this week a report on using Erlang as a web development
language. I am not ashamed to state that I use Perl for web
development and have experimented a number of different languages such
as Python, CFML, .NET, Java, and others. The report had a section
explaining why Erlang was appropriate for web apps which was pretty
persuasive -- multithreading, stability, hot fixes, and so on. The
only problem is that people haven't used Erlang for web apps, but they
have used a lot of Perl. Over a period of time people will tend to use
the tools best suited for particular jobs, and that includes Perl, but
not Erlang. I have a pin extractor which I use rarely, but it's
absolutely indispensable when I need to extract a pin, and in the same
vein, I wouldn't pay much attention to reports that people have
forgotten Perl.
CC
Nathan Keel
Didn't visit the link/video, and who cares what some random person says?
So what is Perl isn't the most hyped or most discussed language by a
lot of people in certain groups? One could use Rails and Ruby on Rails
as an example to say that Perl, Python, C, C++, Java/JSP, and a bunch
of other languages have been forgotten. Not that this link you've
provided says that, but I am betting that's in essence what it says. I
don't even know who Joel Spolensky is, nor do I care, and I don't
believe this person (never hearing of them) is any authority on the
subject. The fact remains, Perl is widely used by hundreds of
thousands or even millions of people every day, either as an end user
or a developer or systems administrator. This type of article is about
on the same level as the media's desire to hype the Swine Flu panic to
get more money for commercials.
Andrew DeFaria
I agree that Perl has been mostly forgotten by the world at large, but I don't think that's the important point.
I've had two experiences in the last four weeks, introducing Perl (or rather, Perl apps) to IT guys who came into the conversation expressing a lot of skepticism about Perl. However, after looking at the code and comparing it head to head in one case with the identical app written in Java, they had to admit that Perl was a legitimate tool for some jobs.
One poster here (I think it was Uri but I might be mistaken) recently observed that Perl was still the best at its original purpose, extracting and reporting data. If many have forgotten Perl or never knew it in the first place, it's because they apparently don't have a need to extract or report data. This isn't a criticism, merely a statement that people don't normally use tools that they don't need.
Andrew DeFaria
I broke a mirror in my house. I'm supposed to get seven years of bad luck, but my lawyer thinks he can get me five.
brian d foy
<2c1ddc85-7d2c-440a...@d39g2000pra.googlegroups.com>,
Ben Bullock <benkasmi...@gmail.com> wrote:
> In case anyone's interested, this is Joel Spolsky of stackoverflow.com
> on Perl:
>
> http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NWHfY_lvKIQ
To be fair, Joel is talking about starting a rewrite project from
scratch, and was mostly talked about how the Netscape to Mozilla
translation almost killed the project. The Perl 6 comment was something
he didn't dwell on, wasn't false, and we would do well to recognize as
history.
Despite what you think of Perl, how much you love it, or how much you
want Perl 6 to succeed, the community botched Perl 6 between 2001 and
2005. There was a lot of initial excitement in 2000 and 2001, and when
everyone completely missed the completely na�ve goals set out in 2000,
a lot of people did stop paying attention. Audrey Tang revitalized it
in 2005 with an implementation on Haskell, and since then things have
been going very nicely. As I tell people, serious development began in
2005. That's embarrassing, but it's the truth.
Andrew DeFaria
In article
<2c1ddc85-7d2c-440a...@d39g2000pra.googlegroups.com>,
Ben Bullock <benkasmi...@gmail.com> wrote:
In case anyone's interested, this is Joel Spolsky of stackoverflow.com on Perl:To be fair, Joel is talking about starting a rewrite project from scratch, and was mostly talked about how the Netscape to Mozilla translation almost killed the project. The Perl 6 comment was something he didn't dwell on, wasn't false, and we would do well to recognize as history.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NWHfY_lvKIQ
Despite what you think of Perl, how much you love it, or how much you want Perl 6 to succeed, the community botched Perl 6 between 2001 and 2005. There was a lot of initial excitement in 2000 and 2001, and when everyone completely missed the completely naïve goals set out in 2000, a lot of people did stop paying attention. Audrey Tang revitalized it in 2005 with an implementation on Haskell, and since then things have been going very nicely. As I tell people, serious development began in 2005. That's embarrassing, but it's the truth.Perl 6... The Windows Vista of Perls! ;-)
We need a Perl 7 - for Windows 7! :-P
Ben Bullock
> In case anyone's interested, this is Joel Spolsky of stackoverflow.com
> on Perl:
For those who don't know who Joel Spolsky is and what
stackoverflow.com is, it's a kind of question and answer site for
programmers founded by two blog authors, Spolsky and another person
called Jeff Atwood.
I used to use the site a lot but stopped posting because of stuff like
this:
http://stackoverflow.com/questions/815787/what-perl-regex-can-match-camelcase-words
> Assuming you aren't using the regex to do extraction, and just matching...
> [A-Z][a-zA-z]*
> Isn't the only real requirement that it's all letters and starts with a capital letter?
I'll leave spotting the mistake here as an exercise for the reader.
What bothers me isn't the mistake so much as that someone has
"upvoted" the answer, and yet another person has wrongly stated it is
"equivalent to Brian's answer". Note that there is no way of knowing
who upvoted this answer. When I was posting on the site I repeatedly
saw wrong answers being upvoted, and had the experience of correct
answers I'd written being downvoted.
I suggest people steer clear of this kind of misinformation site.
Rui Maciel
> <!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.01 Transitional//EN">
> <html>
> <head>
Please try not to post HTML encoded messages.
Rui Maciel
Peter J. Holzer
> I used to use the site a lot but stopped posting because of stuff like
> this:
I haven't used stackoverflow yet so I can't comment on the quality of
the answers in general.
> http://stackoverflow.com/questions/815787/what-perl-regex-can-match-camelcase-words
>
>> Assuming you aren't using the regex to do extraction, and just matching...
>> [A-Z][a-zA-z]*
>> Isn't the only real requirement that it's all letters and starts with a capital letter?
>
> I'll leave spotting the mistake here as an exercise for the reader.
> What bothers me isn't the mistake so much as that someone has
> "upvoted" the answer, and yet another person has wrongly stated it is
> "equivalent to Brian's answer".
And somebody else has corrected the error (which I think was a simple
typo) in the mean time.
> Note that there is no way of knowing who upvoted this answer. When I
> was posting on the site I repeatedly saw wrong answers being upvoted,
> and had the experience of correct answers I'd written being downvoted.
You'll see the same phenomenon in any Usenet discussion: Somebody posts
a correct answer, but somebody else claims that it's wrong. Or somebody
posts a wrong answer and somebody else agrees that it's correct.
Sure, in Usenet you can see who made which comment and if you are in a
group long enough you get a feeling who you can trust, but that even the
most knowledgable make a mistake once in a while and even the dumbest
gets it right sometimes, so you'll still have to think for yourself.
OTOH, in a long Usenet discussion it's sometimes hard to track who said
what and what the real answer is. So I think the concept of
stackoverflow (especially the ability to edit existing answers) is very
promising for a question-and-answers service (which Usenet isn't
primarily).
> I suggest people steer clear of this kind of misinformation site.
I notice that Brian's answer has 6 votes and the answer you critizised
has only 3 votes.
hp
Andrew DeFaria
Charlton Wilbur
RM> Andrew DeFaria wrote:
>> <!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.01 Transitional//EN">
>> <html> <head>
RM> Please try not to post HTML encoded messages.
We've had this dust-up with Mr. DeFaria before. You're better off just
plonking him.
J�rgen Exner
Oh, I had no idea Mr. DeFaria is still around. You must be new because
everyone else has plonked him a loooooong time ago.
jue
Andrew DeFaria
Andrew DeFaria
I went to a bookstore and asked the saleswoman where the Self Help section was, she said if she told me it would defeat the purpose
Andrew DeFaria
RM> Andrew DeFaria wrote:
>> <!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.01 Transitional//EN">
>> <html> <head>
RM> Please try not to post HTML encoded messages.
We've had this dust-up with Mr. DeFaria before. You're better off just plonking him.
s...@netherlands.com
I didn't filter this guy. Anybody else I should know about?
I'm new to plonking. How do I plonk somebody, because I really don't
want to see plonking responses?
-sln
s...@netherlands.com
>>>>>> "RM" == Rui Maciel <rui.m...@gmail.com> writes:
>
> RM> Andrew DeFaria wrote:
> >> <!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.01 Transitional//EN">
> >> <html> <head>
>
> RM> Please try not to post HTML encoded messages.
>
>We've had this dust-up with Mr. DeFaria before. You're better off just
>plonking him.
>
>Charlton
Never had a dust problem with this guy. Maybe you should plonk like you
plonk your boss at work.
-sln
s...@netherlands.com
EasyNews sucks Donkey Dick !!!
-sln
s...@netherlands.com
s...@netherlands.com
s...@netherlands.com
[Sorry. This message is no longer available.]
EasyNews sucks Donkey Dick !!!
And so do you
-sln
s...@netherlands.com
[Sorry. This message is no longer available.]
EasyNews sucks Donkey Dick !!!
-sln
s...@netherlands.com
>>>>>> "RM" == Rui Maciel <rui.m...@gmail.com> writes:
>
> RM> Andrew DeFaria wrote:
> >> <!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.01 Transitional//EN">
> >> <html> <head>
>
> RM> Please try not to post HTML encoded messages.
>
>We've had this dust-up with Mr. DeFaria before. You're better off just
>plonking him.
>
>Charlton
Ben Bullock
> On 2009-05-03 02:30, Ben Bullock <benkasminbull...@gmail.com> wrote:
>
> > I used to use the site a lot but stopped posting because of stuff like
> > this:
>
> I haven't used stackoverflow yet so I can't comment on the quality of
> the answers in general.
The answers really aren't very good. Like Wikipedia, it superficially
seems to contain useful information, but closer inspection will reveal
many problems. On the other hand, what is so impressive about the site
is the forum software itself, which is by far the best I've ever used.
brian d foy
<3ba5137a-bc69-4444...@v1g2000prd.googlegroups.com>, Ben
Bullock <benkasmi...@gmail.com> wrote:
> On May 3, 9:42�pm, "Peter J. Holzer" <hjp-usen...@hjp.at> wrote:
> > On 2009-05-03 02:30, Ben Bullock <benkasminbull...@gmail.com> wrote:
> >
> > > I used to use the site a lot but stopped posting because of stuff like
> > > this:
> >
> > I haven't used stackoverflow yet so I can't comment on the quality of
> > the answers in general.
>
> The answers really aren't very good.
A lot of answers are less than thoughtful and lacking in experience,
but the Perl section has been doing very nicely. There are some very
clueful Perl people who answer most of the questions, but once in a
while there's a lull where a newbie will pop his head up before one of
those people can get there.
It mostly works out.
The answers will certain suffer if all of the experienced people leave,
though. I don't go to stackoverflow to get answers (I know about
Google), but I want to ensure it's not going to be another Matt's
Script Arcive.
Ben Bullock
Please excuse me if you have seen this before.]
On Tue, 05 May 2009 04:22:43 -0500, brian d foy wrote:
> A lot of answers are less than thoughtful and lacking in experience,
> but the Perl section has been doing very nicely. There are some very
> clueful Perl people who answer most of the questions, but once in a
> while there's a lull where a newbie will pop his head up before one of
> those people can get there.
Let's be clear what stackoverflow.com is. The site is set up as a
programming question "video game" where you're awarded "reputation"
points for answering questions. You get maybe one or two points for
asking or answering a difficult question requiring real knowledge, if
you're lucky, and some random chump doesn't decide to downvote you, and
you get lots and lots of points for asking a stupid, annoying question
like "What's your favourite pasta sauce to eat for programming?" or
answering a trivial question which could have easily been looked up on
Google. In the two or three months I spent on stackoverflow.com, I got
the most points for an answer about how to kill a buffer in Emacs. True
story: when I saw the question, I didn't know how to do it, so I looked
up on Google, found it was C-x k, wrote an answer, and "bingo", got about
200 points. It took about a minute. (And incidentally now I can get rid
of all those annoying "mydoc.pl<2>" and "mydoc.pl<3>" buffers in Emacs,
which I used to get rid of by closing Emacs and opening it again, so I
can't say I didn't learn anything from the stackoverflow.com experience.)
I also lost a lot of points by telling someone who'd commented on one of
my answers that he should look something up on Google instead of asking
me. It was pretty annoying to write correct answers to questions and have
them downvoted by ludicrous people who feel offended when someone tells
them to try to solve their own problems. What would these people make of
the "posting guidelines for comp.lang.perl.misc" I wonder? That would
probably be downvoted so much it turned a nasty shade of brown and faded
away, so you'd have to delete it just to save your reputation (and then
you'd earn a "peer pressure" badge, lucky you).
Another misfeature of the site is that the person who answers the
question first usually gets the most points, so there is a rush to answer
questions which leads to people making mistakes. For instance, I recently
caught out one of the "clueful Perl people" (= someone who has a MacBook
Air and a ponytail) with a mistake in an answer about the ~~ operator
which I don't think he'd have made if he'd thought about it for
a minute or two.
Sherm Pendley
> [This is a repost since I believe the previous post of this failed.
> Please excuse me if you have seen this before.]
>
> On Tue, 05 May 2009 04:22:43 -0500, brian d foy wrote:
>
>> A lot of answers are less than thoughtful and lacking in experience,
>> but the Perl section has been doing very nicely. There are some very
>> clueful Perl people who answer most of the questions, but once in a
>> while there's a lull where a newbie will pop his head up before one of
>> those people can get there.
>
> Let's be clear what stackoverflow.com is. The site is set up as a
> programming question "video game" where you're awarded "reputation"
> points for answering questions.
Precisely! I spent maybe two months on that site. That was long enough
to see many patently incorrect "answers" get voted up and even "accepted,"
and to realize that the site is just a popularity contest. As a technical
resource, it's as useless as slashdot.
sherm--
--
My blog: http://shermspace.blogspot.com
Cocoa programming in Perl: http://camelbones.sourceforge.net
Randal L. Schwartz
>> Let's be clear what stackoverflow.com is. The site is set up as a
>> programming question "video game" where you're awarded "reputation"
>> points for answering questions.
Sherm> Precisely! I spent maybe two months on that site. That was long enough
Sherm> to see many patently incorrect "answers" get voted up and even
Sherm> "accepted," and to realize that the site is just a popularity
Sherm> contest. As a technical resource, it's as useless as slashdot.
It's like a really poor imitation of perlmonks.org, which has taken *years* of
tuning to get the right mix of points, editors, questions, answers,
troll-response, searching, sorting and so on. Why people think they can start
over without the benefit of a decade of experience on that, not sure.
print "Just another Perl hacker,"; # the original
--
Randal L. Schwartz - Stonehenge Consulting Services, Inc. - +1 503 777 0095
<mer...@stonehenge.com> <URL:http://www.stonehenge.com/merlyn/>
Smalltalk/Perl/Unix consulting, Technical writing, Comedy, etc. etc.
See http://methodsandmessages.vox.com/ for Smalltalk and Seaside discussion