Enk1du

Now I know the only place that Allman style indentation looks good is on a wall.

For those who want the comparison, CPAN is Perl's npm or PyPI and is having to deal with the same issues of security and verification. Hope they get it right.

That recent?!? Most criticism of Perl comes from people listening to second-hand rants of someone who hasn't looked at Perl since 2001.

Yes, the article could be improved by the Make magazine advice on submissions that you should write a 3 paragraph summary of your article and then submit that instead. This could have been shaved down to the 4 paras at the end (Prologue) to make the author's point more succinctly.

After reading the Disclosure in the second paragraph (the motivation for the post), you can skip down to the Comparison and Prologue where you get to the real heart of the post, that in the author's opinion a Federal contractor is using Java for the purpose of extracting funds from the government.

And yes, a Perl team would be much smaller.

I tried to remember the study that put the usefulness of a CEO at 10% of the success of the company and found this Science Direct paper from 2023 on "The CEO effect and performance variation over time" which discusses many studies. tl;dr average is 15-20% but they have fun chewing over the outliers.

https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S104898432...

Pfft. Spelling differences is minor league stuff. Try code-switching on silence.

Pointed out to me by a Kiwi, that Americans take silence after a statement to mean general agreement, but in Britain silence implicitly asks, "Are you _really sure_ you want to be doing that?"

I remember the "Aha" moment on the face of a python-flavoured data scientist when I showed her my Perl scripts for managing LDAP groups.

One look at the class files (written in Moose) and she was stunned that she could immediately understand it, having never written Perl before.

> Python is backed by Google

For me, this is why python took off. People wanted that lucrative job or receive the reflected glory of a winner, so y'gotta learn python. The rest is just post-hoc justification for why you made that choice passed on as "this language is better because of blah..."

A lot of the justifications don't stack up against serious scrutiny, but are accepted as gospel.

This combined with a cpanfile is how I rescued someone else's workshop from being an "Install these missing dependencies" session to being back on track in 3 minutes with "Here's this file, run 'cpanm --installdeps --notest .'"

https://metacpan.org/pod/cpanfile

Not mentioned is that there are _many_ BBC's which became clear when watching the difference in coverage between the local and national broadcasts during Covid. The national editorial team spared the government's blushes at every turn, whereas the local teams reported what was actually happening in their communities, to the point where you were getting more real news from a smaller, underfunded news service.

They each have their own agendas.

> The Further and Higher Education Act 1992 (c. 13) made changes in the funding and administration of further education and higher education [0]

It was more about reducing budgets. That Conservative government was not filled with class warriors. Oh, how times have changed.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Further_and_Higher_Education_A...

I play with the timers to layer different sounds in and out. It's the best pomodoro timer out there, for me.

I suppose it's because very soon people got tired of writing

  $a->[2]->{"bar"}

which is equivalent and also works, but suffers from the explosion of punctuation that Perl often gets criticised for. There's an element of Do What I Mean where the first arrow says this is a reference and work the rest out for me.

I quite enjoyed Perl Best Practices[0] for the rationales behind every decision, most of which I could get on board with. Plus, if you really like it you can auto-reformat code with perltidy[1] using the "--perl-best-practices" flag or check your files with Perl::Critic[2] policies based on PBP.

It's dear to me because it came along at a time when I needed short breaks from thesis writing.

  [0] https://www.oreilly.com/library/view/perl-best-practices/0596001738/
  [1] https://metacpan.org/dist/Perl-Tidy/view/bin/perltidy
  [2] https://metacpan.org/pod/Perl::Critic

At Las Campanas, most of the staff from the cooks to the techs and a number of the researchers were all local. I found quite a bit of interest in the country as a whole as it's a source of national pride being the best location for astronomy.

Allowing this to proceed will affect _all_ future astronomy projects in Chile. No one is going to splash out on a shiny, new 100m optical telescope (OWL) if anyone can come along and park a city's worth of light just down the road.

https://www.eso.org/sci/facilities/eelt/owl/

Nothing stopping anyone from using Inline::Perl or NativeCall [0]. I'd like to see Raku's concurrency model working on these data structures. Otherwise there's always PDL::ParallelCPU [1]

[0] https://docs.raku.org/language/nativecall [1] https://metacpan.org/pod/PDL::ParallelCPU

For me, it's the acceleration of development in the last 5 years as seen in the Changes file. It's now releasing new versions almost every month.

https://github.com/PDLPorters/pdl/blob/master/Changes

What could be described as Numpy for Perl, PDL was released in 1996 and is now seeing a resurgence of interest. The Advent Calendar showcases some of its features in a festive mood.

and more advents...

https://pdl.perl.org/advent/index.html

Ah, now the Natural Born Heroes heroism and the virtue of Xenia (ξενία) I can get behind.

It's the ego-inflating ""heroes" in scare quotes" that crave validation that I find so exasperating.

Some more reading on cognitive errors and expertise for you https://www.amazon.com/Blind-Spot-Solution-Right-Front/dp/00...

>Depressingly, this means that we consistently put public policy in the hands of people who are demonstrably incompetent.

You could depress yourself further by thinking that we get the government we deserve or you could re-assess your role in making good progress.

"A community is like a ship, everyone should be prepared to take the helm." - Henrik Ibsen

The best advice I've seen on the issue is "Don't scar on the first cut", as in you shouldn't try to add a new rule every time you have an outage.

That being said, I absolutely hate heroes.

I've worked with a couple that get their thrills from the adrenaline buzz of swooping in and fixing the big problem ... and walking away. They don't put the work into documentation or making systems resilient because that's boring. I like boring. Boring means I can clock off at the regular time and not think about work until the next day.

North America is very car-focused. Transit in Europe is also much better, although your experience will vary from country to country.

Even with all that oil money gushing through Alberta, it still takes 9.5 hours to drive from Medicine Hat to Grand Prairie - which is the same distance as Barcelona to Seville, a train journey of 5.5 hours including the changing of trains in Madrid.

Wait ... a _speech synthesizer_?!?!?! How did we never hear about that?

Well, I suppose for the same reason the "talk" command (which wrote a message to all networked terminals) was removed after the first day.

(it's shown on the motherboard, 7th image down)

I think this is a function of hours of practice. I remember the point when I started hearing the silent "h" in Spanish and also when I stopped understanding what native speakers were saying after 3 months because I'd progressed beyond the level where they felt they had to slow their speech down for me. Lots of plateaus in the learning curve.

It was kind of a thing at the time. In the Afterword of Æleen Frisch's Essential System Administration (also 1991) subtitled "Don't Forget to Have Fun", there are listed _seven_ virtues of a system administrator:

* Flexibility: being able to wriggle out of tight spots and escape when irate users seem to have you cornered

* Ingenuity: realizing that you can use syslog to send messages to your friend on another system

* Patience: remaining capable of waiting until the final sendmail bug is fixed

* Persistence: the compulsion to try just-one-more-thing to fix a problem before going home

* Adherence to Routine: insisting on real milk and sugar-in-the-raw in your coffee (which is Kona or nothing)

* Attention to Detail: noticing that the clock on one of your systems is using Aleutian time, and changing all the others to match

* Laziness: writing a 250-line Perl script to avoid typing 15 characters

I took the last one to heart and have admired those who could utilize the first one, because I never could.

A quick explanation of the Three Virtues by Larry and then an impromptu explanation of why Hobbits would make good programmers

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=G49RUPv5-NU

Hubris was really about building the community. It encouraged you to build things that you would want to share, so that we could all benefit from your Laziness and Impatience.

For me, it's code review that makes me write in a maintainable style. It's the team that's responsible for a code base and objections are raised whenever anyone thinks that they'll struggle to understand this or that line. We also enforce consistency. Yes, you _can_ choose any character for quoting lists, but for the love of Pete, you _will_ follow how it's done in every other case (in that file, at least).

I'll miss you qw//, but I was out-voted. :(