The Emperor's New Clothes

[Anonymous Monk]

Below is the shortest perl code ever written. If you cannot see it then you are a fool: Can you see it?

[TimToady]

And here's the obligatory Perl 6 version of it. As you can see, it's much clearer and cleaner.

[Gavin]

But aren't you The Emperor?

[runrig]

You forgot to enclose it in <code></code> tags.

[Anonymous Monk]

Fool. You obviously cannot see the code.

[ikegami]

Who would have thought NUL: and /dev/null were Perl code generators!

[jdporter]

You didn't tell the secret: It only works if perl is executed...

<Reveal this spoiler or all in this thread>

[Gavin]

You missed

use strict;
use warnings;

[JavaFan]

The emperor has second hand clothes?

[matze77]

Would have been interesting: if you posted it with real name to see what xp or xp loss you got from this, nice anyway ;-).

[BrowserUk]

Foolish or not. No, I cannot see it! And I challenge you to prove it exists.

[papidave]

Perhaps, BrowserUK, but I can see nothing there. Unless, of course, I don't exist either.

... which reminds me, it's far more interesting to consider the challenge of proving whether or not I exist. Invoking Descartes only works on $self, and I'm not exposing that method, so you can't use it in your proof.

[BrowserUk]

BrowserUk: Foolish or not. No, I cannot see it! ...

popidave: Perhaps, BrowserUK, but I can see nothing there. ...

Doesn't that mean we are in agreement?

My point FWIW, is that in the original story, the Emperor walked around naked because he was scared to challenge the "new technologist" tailor's claims about his revolutionary new material. And the courtiers were too scared to go against the Emperor's opinion. It's a funny story and kids (of a certain age) love it. The idea of the Emperor walking around naked has them in stitches. But the story has a very relevant serious side.

The same trick is being performed all around us, all the time. Listen closly to adverts--cosmetic ads are some of the best examples currently. Listen to all the technobable they use--"ceramides"; "aquacurrent science"; "cellular level cleansing"; "biomolecular"; "microtechnology bioactive"; "pro-collagen"; "microsmoothing"; "bio-stimulating"; "microlift".

And over the last 30 years, I've seen the same thing over and over in our industry. Promise after promise that the latest silver-bullet, techno-speak, "new paradigm" is going to revolutionise our industry and fix all its ills.

OO has certain obvious and demonstrable benefits--but there are those that would have you not just buy in to OO for those parts of your code that lend themselves to it; but for all your code. So, you can no longer use a global variable for inherently global entities--you have to wrap them over in a "singleton pattern", and complicate your code 10 fold in the process.

The functional crowd will convince of the benefits of side-effect free functions--of which there are many. But will then go on to try and convince you that all code should be side-effects free--even when the primary, and often only, purpose is to effect a side-effect. Think IO.

Sometimes the only sensible thing to do, is to call upon the proponents of a counterintuative notion, to prove their position.

[Anonymous Monk]

For an explanation of the code see John Cage's 4'33".

[rpetre]

I believe there is some wisdom in this after all. Sometimes the best code is not writing any code at all.

[setebos]

No, this isn't the shortest Perl code, because you didn't follow one main prerequisite:

`rm`$^X