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

mcmillen.dev

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

#31

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?

My kids were raised out in the woods basically...it's tricky. When they were little they played outside quite a bit, but as they got older they just lost kind of lost interest. I think the loss of the social connection over the outdoors is some of it...they can play out there all they want but if there's nobody else out there to do the same it gets old quick.

I saw someone mention summer camp, some kind of structured mechanism to do it would help a lot i think.

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

#33

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

Perl scripts look like piles of vomit to me

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

#34
post #8

This is obviously just a bit of fun, but looking at the output examples, I think the OCR used may be flawed in that it's heavily optimised to produce characters used in natural language (alpha & spaces) rather than to produce e.g. operators common in code. The number of "special characters" output is extremely small. This will bias it heavily toward producing identifiers, which will be valid in most common programmin…

I don’t think that’s a flaw! The study is “95% of paint splatters” not “95% of random strings of ASCII characters”. If common OCR programs are optimized to produce letters and spaces, fair game!

(You would of course want a “proper” scientific study to be more rigorous about these things.)

Edit: Also, the programs in the article appear to be mostly special characters?

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

#35
post #8

This is obviously just a bit of fun, but looking at the output examples, I think the OCR used may be flawed in that it's heavily optimised to produce characters used in natural language (alpha & spaces) rather than to produce e.g. operators common in code. The number of "special characters" output is extremely small. This will bias it heavily toward producing identifiers, which will be valid in most common programmin…

The examples at the bottom of the page are mostly special characters, like the valid program `;i;c;;#\\?z{;?;;fn':.;, `

Reminds me of the joke: "Perl is the only programming language which looks the same before and after encryption."

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

#37

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

Was this edited? I don’t see why anyone is reading this comment as rude or offensive … Seems fine.

He’s basically ribbing GP by purposefully misinterpreting the comment, so that what gave GP nightmares was his CMS rather than Perl itself.

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

#38

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

It's 2021, stop writing legacy code that others will have to maintain.

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

#39
post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The examples at the bottom of the page are mostly special characters, like the valid program `;i;c;;#\\?z{;?;;fn':.;, `

Reminds me of the joke: "Perl is the only programming language which looks the same before and after encryption."

please, perl ha nothing on q
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