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93% of Paint Splatters Are Valid Perl Programs (2019)

mcmillen.dev

21–30 of 170 posts

Re: 93% of Paint Splatters Are Valid Perl Programs (2019)

#21

Can we talk about the original tweet some? How DO we let kids be kids in this age where all the other kids wanna do is be on YouTube and TikTok?

I have kids of my own, and I think it's absolutely possible to do both. My daughter is 4 now, and loves to splash in mud and do all of that stuff. At the same time, she loves doing puzzles and art, which is still normal kid stuff.

I think the problem is that the original tweet seems to think that "coding" is only a vocational skill, and it's definitely not. When you're that age, coding is just another form of expression and exploration. It can make something useful, but it's just puzzles and fingerpaint.

Re: 93% of Paint Splatters Are Valid Perl Programs (2019)

#22

That's a fun read. I once wrote an entire CMS in Perl. I still wake up, screaming, sometimes. [UPDATE] It appears as if my flippant remark caused upset. I am sincerely sorry that this was the case. No offense was meant. @peteretep, you have my sincere apology. It was a flippant remark. At the time I wrote it (mid-1990s), Perl was the best way to write portable server-side code. I took the time to learn it, and got fa…

Fun fact: cPanel[0] is still written in Perl

[0]: https://www.cpanel.com/

Re: 93% of Paint Splatters Are Valid Perl Programs (2019)

#23

Can we talk about the original tweet some? How DO we let kids be kids in this age where all the other kids wanna do is be on YouTube and TikTok?

Why are TikTok and YouTube excluded from "kids being kids" activities?

If that's what all the kids are doing then it seems that's what a kids activity has become.

I used to play with neighborhood kids quite a bit when I was younger. Now my nephew plays Fortnite almost every day with 5ish different friends. He gets way more experience socializing than I ever did.

Ultimately (I think) kids need to learn to socialize with their peers. That means they need to participate with their peers doing what their peers are doing.

Re: 93% of Paint Splatters Are Valid Perl Programs (2019)

#24

That's a fun read. I once wrote an entire CMS in Perl. I still wake up, screaming, sometimes. [UPDATE] It appears as if my flippant remark caused upset. I am sincerely sorry that this was the case. No offense was meant. @peteretep, you have my sincere apology. It was a flippant remark. At the time I wrote it (mid-1990s), Perl was the best way to write portable server-side code. I took the time to learn it, and got fa…

I’m sorry the code you produced made you so unhappy EDIT: verb tense changed

Don't take attacks on a tool you like as an attack on you.

This is rarely ever the intention, and I'm 100% certain wasn't the intention of the poster here.

The tools you use shouldn't be your identity. Chill.

Re: 93% of Paint Splatters Are Valid Perl Programs (2019)

#25
post #2

Sometimes I forget how insane Perl was before `use strict;` became commonplace.

use strict; has basically eliminated typos or variable-related errors for me.

combined with -T, it's given me a lot of peace of mind, which I miss when using PHP.

I'm seriously contemplating writing my own SetConst and GetConst functions. (Lately I've been finding a lot of sense in immutable variables.)

Re: 93% of Paint Splatters Are Valid Perl Programs (2019)

#26
post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I’m sorry the code you produced made you so unhappy EDIT: verb tense changed

Don't take attacks on a tool you like as an attack on you. This is rarely ever the intention, and I'm 100% certain wasn't the intention of the poster here. The tools you use shouldn't be your identity. Chill.

Can we get a bot that automatically posts what you just said in every thread about k8s and Rust?

Re: 93% of Paint Splatters Are Valid Perl Programs (2019)

#27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I’m sorry the code you produced made you so unhappy EDIT: verb tense changed

Why do people post nasty things like this?

Some of us are veterans of the time when Perl was evangelized as the cure for everything, and the only way to sensibly think about unix programming. That led to the usual over-reaction from Perl critics and it became usual to make sharper comments about it even when you'd never used Perl.

Which all goes to show people clot up into tribes over any silly thing; and that its better not to wrap your identity too much around your tools.

Re: 93% of Paint Splatters Are Valid Perl Programs (2019)

#29

I wonder what the equivalent result would be for Raku (aka, the language formerly known as Perl 6). By the way, the first Raku Conference is happening in a few weeks, Aug. 6–8 https://conf.raku.org

Given that Raku's design originally stems from the "strict" subset of Perl 5, this would never work. This only works when Perl runs in non-strict pre-5 mode (which is the default before 7.0).

Yeah, I bet you're right. My first thought was that all the different ways Raku has of letting you start entering a string literal might make up for that but, on second thought, those all need to have a corresponding closing pair so that wouldn't really help.

Re: 93% of Paint Splatters Are Valid Perl Programs (2019)

#30
post #23

Can we talk about the original tweet some? How DO we let kids be kids in this age where all the other kids wanna do is be on YouTube and TikTok?

Why are TikTok and YouTube excluded from "kids being kids" activities? If that's what all the kids are doing then it seems that's what a kids activity has become. I used to play with neighborhood kids quite a bit when I was younger. Now my nephew plays Fortnite almost every day with 5ish different friends. He gets way more experience socializing than I ever did. Ultimately (I think) kids need to learn to socialize wi…

I am very glad that I did not do all of what my peers were doing.
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