Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

93% of Paint Splatters Are Valid Perl Programs

colinm.org

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

11–20 of 135 posts

Re: 93% of Paint Splatters Are Valid Perl Programs

#11

Post by freedomben »

cure wrote: post #8
telesilla wrote: post #7

I miss Perl. Why did PHP win again, in the late 90s? (though I'm mostly Python these days and shan't complain, there was a good 10 year stretch of PHP there I'm not proud of).

Yeah... Ruby's very nice and feels Perl-ish sometimes.

Yep, if you like Perl you've got to spend some time with Ruby. It shares a heritage. Many of the people I used to Perl with moved over and were (and are) very happy. That said many of the "perl-isms" in Ruby are looked down upon by the community, but you can still use them ;-)

Re: 93% of Paint Splatters Are Valid Perl Programs

#12

Post by unixpickle »

> Also, ImageNet’s website was down on the day that we decided to perform this research. We therefore paid an unemployed person to download 100 examples of paint-splatter artwork by searching Pinterest using the query “paint splatter wallpaper”.

Such brutal honesty would be welcome in other papers.

Re: 93% of Paint Splatters Are Valid Perl Programs

#13

Post by ars »

telesilla wrote: post #7

I miss Perl. Why did PHP win again, in the late 90s? (though I'm mostly Python these days and shan't complain, there was a good 10 year stretch of PHP there I'm not proud of).

Because for anything you wanted to do there were 6 different ways to do it in Perl, making it rather hard to learn Perl.

Perl also looks like line noise, which makes it hard to read.

PHP also won because you can take a .html file add and it's a valid PHP program. Perl was harder.

Re: 93% of Paint Splatters Are Valid Perl Programs

#14

Post by onion2k »

telesilla wrote: post #7

I miss Perl. Why did PHP win again, in the late 90s? (though I'm mostly Python these days and shan't complain, there was a good 10 year stretch of PHP there I'm not proud of).

PHP won because it was easy to install and restrict (by memory usage) on shared servers, as well as the fact that writing a PHP script was as simple as renaming an .html file to .php so web designers who wanted some dynamic functionality could use it really easily.

As bad as some aspects of PHP were, making it so trivial to install and make available on a server was a brilliant move that lots of languages could still learn from today.

If you have a project you want to become popular putting real work in to the initial onboarding is vital.

Re: 93% of Paint Splatters Are Valid Perl Programs

#18

Post by bdcravens »

cure wrote: post #8
telesilla wrote: post #7

I miss Perl. Why did PHP win again, in the late 90s? (though I'm mostly Python these days and shan't complain, there was a good 10 year stretch of PHP there I'm not proud of).

Yeah... Ruby's very nice and feels Perl-ish sometimes.

That's intentional.

https://www.ruby-lang.org/en/about/

"Ruby is a language of careful balance. Its creator, Yukihiro “Matz” Matsumoto, blended parts of his favorite languages (Perl, Smalltalk, Eiffel, Ada, and Lisp) ..."

Re: 93% of Paint Splatters Are Valid Perl Programs

#19

Post by 275qaz »

puls wrote: post #10

I love this footnote so much: > This feature does enable a neat quine: the Perl program “Illegal division by zero at /tmp/quine.pl line 1.”, when saved in the appropriate location, outputs “Illegal division by zero at /tmp/quine.pl line 1.” The reason for this behavior is left as an exercise for the reader.

It's trying to divide "Illegal division by zero at /" by "tmp/quine.pl line 1." and "tmp/quine.pl line 1." evaluates to 0?
Post reply on HN