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taint

by taint (Chaplain)
on Jun 19, 2012 at 21:40 UTC ( [id://977156]=user: print w/replies, xml ) Need Help??


  What's this about laziness? Isn't that a pejorative way to describe luminaries of the Perl universe?

  Actually, no; they'd take it as a compliment.

 The three principal virtues of Perl programmers:

  1. Laziness: "Hard work" sounds, well, hard. If you're faced with a mindless, repetitive task--such as running for public office--then laziness will make you balk at doing the same thing over and over again. Instead of stifling your creative spirit, you'll cultivate it by inventing a process that automates the repetitive task. If the Karate Kid had been a Perl programmer, he'd have abstracted the common factor from "wax on" and "wax off" shortly before fetching an orbital buffer. (Only to get, er, waxed, in the tournament from being out of shape. But I digress.)
  2. Impatience: There's more than enough work to do in this business. By being impatient to get to the next thing quickly, you'll not spend unnecessary time on the task you're doing; you'll find ways to make it as efficient as possible.
  3. Hubris: It's not good enough to be lazy and impatient if you're going to take them as an excuse to do lousy work. You need an unreasonable amount of pride in your abilities to carry you past the many causes for discouragement. If you didn't, and you thought about all the things that could go wrong with your code, you'd either never get out of bed in the morning, or just quit and take up potato farming.

  4. --Larry Wall

2013-12-07

About me -- should anyone give a s{...}t.

In my youth, I used to make SuperComputers, well, processors. Which were comprised of capacitors, many of them. Do note, this was back before the dawn of the now, common place transistor, and, the PC.

Later, of course. I used transistors.

Owned, and operated one of the first BBS's (3rd I think) on the west coast.

Had fiber hauled up to my house, and used a "fido tosser" to permit BBS users to exchange email over the internet.

From there, I became a hostmaster. Which then, largely consisted of being a DNS provider. Which, back then, meant compiling a list of inter-connected computers, by name, and exchanging them by Email. Yep. That's the way it was done, back then. I remain both today. Average ~160 domains, and ~12,000 hosts, and no I don't handle DNS that way today. ;)

Perl experience:
Used Perl near exclusively, back in the 4x days. As well as the early 5x days, and I was very good at it. An artist. But then, became distracted by, ahem, PHP. I'm somewhat embarrassed by this, except to the extent I learned that no matter how hard I try. I cannot make PHP as powerful, or as do-all, as Perl. PHP is a lightweight s‎crip‎ting tool -- nothing more.

After my epiphany, regarding PHP. I stopped using Perl, as well, and began work on a new DNS resolver, using the C language -- assembler was my first language, so C was already a familiar language. After completion. I spent good deal of time testing, and improving it. I'm pleased to say, it's faster, safer, and smaller, than any other resolver available today. :)

Perl today.
Well, I'm back using Perl as my "daily driver". But it's been a long while. As you might imagine, things have changed alot. There's now this thing called "OO" that the Perl community, seems to insist is "it". While I'm not convinced, I see this as the direction it will continue to travel. So I'll roll with it. Perl itself has also changed greatly. I'm trying to catch up. But have a ways to go. At this stage, where Perl is concerned; I'm either brilliant, or an idiot. There's no in between. :P

Well. There you have it. I'm surprised you read this far. :)
Best wishes to you.

--Chris out...



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