Viewing profile — ccashell

It can definitely be worthwhile. First, Perl takes some unique approaches to programming language design, and that will stretch your brain and make you a better programming. New co…

"Perl 5 has been on the same major version for 30 years now" I don't know that I would consider that accurate. 'Perl 5' is really no longer a version, but the language itself. It's…

For many languages, the implementation and spec are completely separate entities. Many of the biggest ones, actually: - C - C++ - Java - JavaScript

If you're doing some sort of processing where you're calling an external script hundreds or thousands of times, you're probably doing it wrong. You should be writing it to get call…

I'm not sure I understand your complaint/concern. We're talking about text chat and video chat clients, and you're concerned with giving them access to your contacts? How are you g…

Times change. IBM-style "professional" is not the "anal retentive, by the book pedantic clock puncher" you might think. I worked there over 10 years ago, and we had no written dres…

I think it's a pretty weak reason to give up on a language because you were using a global variable and expecting it to automatically be treated as a local variable within your fun…

I found the statistics to be quite interesting. The conclusions drawn by the author, however, left a lot to be desired. Most of them were not directly (or even indirectly) supporte…

I think you make some very good points, but I have to disagree rather strongly with this one: > My general experience with DBAs, sysadmins, techs and the like is that they generall…

Yeah, I found the title to be misleading and quite annoying. It should definitely be fixed to clarify. To the vast majority of the IT world, Apache == Web Server, not Apache Softwa…

> If you choose to do complex things and do them in complex ways, or you can only see complex solutions where simple solutions exist, I guess a module-powered scripting language li…

So, if I can build a wagon with a lawnmower engine from parts, and it is able to putter down the street (barely) faster than I can walk, why should I use a car? That's my question.…

> A basic problem: Perl allows them to hack away all day and write hideous code that ensures they will never get fired. Due to their laziness the script will be undocumented, lack …

I'm a sysadmin who does development on the side. When I start writing something, I think about how big I expect it to be. If it's expected to be 50 lines or less, then it's bash fo…

Well said. Sometimes a new tool will come along that truly is a huge improvement on previous tools. But, when those previous tools are "classics", it's pretty rare that the "new" t…

Agreed. Ruby is very popular in a few smallish circles. It's still essentially unknown pretty much everywhere that isn't a small web-based startup.

Yeah, I'm gonna have to completely disagree with you here. I'm a sysadmin that does a decent amount of automation and scripting work. Almost all of that is done in Perl. Among the …

I hate PHP. Personally, I just don't like the language. However, it's still incredibly popular in the web world. As for the rest? Ruby on Rails was super hot a year or so ago, beca…

Careful with that assumption. In my experience on a recent project, finding Perl developers was a good bit easier than finding Python developers. Generally, though, I think both ar…

I think it's worth it for a very small number of people. They note that a top school will cost you $50k per year in tuition. If you figure 2 years for an MBA, that's $100k. If you …