nchelluri

i was kinda shocked to see all the negativity in this thread. i looked at this post and thought 'beautiful' and kinda mind-blown at the simple elegance of it. ruby is one of those languages that was cutting edge in 1995 and is apparently cutting edge today. it writes and reads like nothing else. it can be made very, very, or too terse, but it can be made to read simply and concisely and clearly with an economy of characters spent. i also am not a huge fan of the metaprogramming madness. but ruby is a beautiful language and i definitely

  'think highly' => sentiment

this post.

That couldn't have worked out better, and was a nice thing for you and your wife to have done.

thanks :)

I have a copy of this book and haven't read it. I keep fearing my background won't be strong enough. I struggle with some high school math (I did get a math degree many years ago but haven't kept up with even basic algebra, and it shows). This book's preface says it complements How to Solve It, another book I've been scared to crack open.

Nonetheless the thinness of the book and the foreword about applications and real world math are very promising. Maybe I should try it out. Any thoughts from someone who has read it?

Very interesting thought! I think I'll steal it.

There are a couple of points in there:

1. You can use virtually any language to write clean code

Not sure if I agree with this, though it may well be true. I just know there are some things like Brainfuck where it's designed to be impossible. I realize that language is created specifically for the purpose of making a coder say "WTF", but perhaps there are other languages that are not designed to be so that are really nearly impossible to write good code in.

2. Perl lends itself to unreadable code

If you stick to Modern Perl you still might end up with things like `wantarray` in your code so I guess this is kind of true. You need to be judicious in your use of code.

Some languages lend themselves more easily to writing clean code, like I feel about Go or if you hate the Go type system, Ruby. Even in Ruby I feel like metaprogramming is ripe for misuse.

It's a tough thing to talk about. I don't feel like I wholeheartedly disagree with your sentiment which seems to be "some languages lend themselves to bad code" and subsequently that Perl lends itself to bad code but there is plenty of ambiguity in these thoughts.

I've been writing (Modern) Perl for about 3.5 years and I disagree that Perl necessarily tends to unreadable code. I really don't think that's true at all.

To quote myself from a recent discussion:

I think some languages do make it easy to write convoluted code, but through judicious use of coding standards (including a helping of common sense [don't be clever where you can at all avoid it, which IME is ~~almost~~ all the time], code linters, and so on) I think how you use a language plays a huge part in code maintainability.

For instance, I've heard PHP get shit on pretty badly all around the web, but I've worked at PHP shops that had nice, clean codebases, and my current Perl codebase is, in many ways, nicely structured. That's not to say there aren't some hairy codepaths that could use refactoring, but I really think that kind of thing, again, can happen in almost any language.

I think you can learn most/all of Perl 5.32 with http://modernperlbooks.com/books/modern_perl_2016/ , and it appears this is, initially, going to be 5.32 with some saner defaults. So you could really start now, given that.

> This beloved guide is now completely updated for Perl 5.22.

I've been working with Perl since about 5.20 and am on 5.31 or 5.32 and haven't noticed many breaking changes FWIW.

> PHP went directly from 5 to 7, and isn’t it time to steal something from that community?

:D

> Are there actually people that are still deploying new things in Perl?

See https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23593835

I'll shoot you an email, since you've got your email in your profile :)

I wrote a simple "disaster-ready[1]" site for physical distancing, called the virtual bulletin board system. It is currently in operation in my city but nobody uses it. I tried to get it off the ground but I'm not really sure how to do it.

Basically, I think of it as a "geowiki" - a wiki where each entry has an address and a lat/lng associated with it. Here's a screenshot: https://i.imgur.com/RiCiuDi.png

I went on the radio on a call-in show, I advertised it on the local city Reddit and their discord server, but it didn't catch on - at all. Except for a couple of vandals who deleted all the entries :)

It was fun, but it would have been a lot more fun if people had actually used it. I still might try to get it off the ground again, but I don't know how off the top of my head.

[1] What does disaster ready mean? It means that the site uses very little resources for the browsing operation. It is all static HTML/JS/CSS and uses cgi-bin (!) for the admin side/adding a new listing.

I can't say I agree with the mental model critique for the most part. I think some languages do make it easy to write convoluted code, but through judicious use of coding standards (including a helping of common sense [don't be clever where you can at all avoid it, which IME is ~~almost~~ all the time], code linters, and so on) I think how you use a language plays a huge part in code maintainability.

For instance, I've heard PHP get shit on pretty badly all around the web, but I've worked at PHP shops that had nice, clean codebases, and my current Perl codebase is, in many ways, nicely structured. That's not to say there aren't some hairy codepaths that could use refactoring, but I really think that kind of thing, again, can happen in almost any language.

Ooh, https://metacpan.org/pod/release/XSAWYERX/perl-5.32.0/pod/pe... . Looks nice.

We use it at my workplace pretty extensively. Where possible, new work is done in Go, and as time and effort permits work is underway to port things to Go, but there is enough legacy stuff in Perl like our (front-end, customer-facing) web application that sometimes new features are written in Perl.

Modern Perl using Moose is pretty nice to develop in. I find it much easier to express things in Perl than in Go, but I am not an expert in either language despite having several years practice with the former and a couple of years with the latter.

http://modernperlbooks.com/books/modern_perl_2016/

I'd say the biggest issue with Perl is that modules on the CPAN are slowly going stale, and that my understanding is that there is a lot of Perl (C) and XS (C FFI) code that is not actively maintained or necessarily properly developed (including, I believe, parts of the Perl runtime itself). This can lead to segfaults with who knows what behavior.

Take this with a grain of salt: I've never been a good C programmer.

An aside: one of my coworkers is a founder of MetaCPAN, which is a great site.

That does sound awful. Did they allow a grace period for people to download/migrate their stuff off the platform?

fwiw, it took me a minute to figure out but I think that the post you're replying to was a joke.

> If I had more time, I would have written a shorter letter.

Here's a size comparison with a "hello world" program in my favorite language, Go.

  nchelluri@grugbarn:~/dev/hello $ cat > hello.go
  package main

  import "fmt"

  func main() {
      fmt.Println("hello world")
  }
  nchelluri@grugbarn:~/dev/hello $ go build
  nchelluri@grugbarn:~/dev/hello $ strip hello
  nchelluri@grugbarn:~/dev/hello $ ./hello 
  hello world
  nchelluri@grugbarn:~/dev/hello $ du -h
  1.4M .

I love IRC logs, I find them extremely helpful for diagnosing and working through technical issues that someone has faced before.

It's like a step-by-step guide to solving your problem.

Unfortunately, all of the IRC logs I used to browse went offline with GDPR. GDPR, California's privacy act, etc. are all well-meaning but IMO poorly implemented.

Hello, just a quick note; I wanted to buy the book so I went to the website and when I picked my country as Canada it started giving me a strange list of provinces (definitely not Canadian) so I abandoned the process for now.

thank you! I'll give it a read.

I would love to have one of these for a week or two to try it out. It's so cheap it might be worth picking up on the off chance I love it.

I want this in an XPS 13 too. I just bought an XPS 13 last year, running Ubuntu, and it's very nice, aside from the whine when it's plugged in.

I've used a fully loaded MacBook and it works well. It's quite slow compared to a desktop but it's fast enough and has the Retina screen. This laptop is basically a tablet in laptop form factor; it is ultra tiny and very nice to use from a physicality standpoint.

I'm currently using an X1 Carbon ThinkPad Gen 4 with a 4K screen and it is pretty nice too. It's a step up both performance wise and size wise from the MacBook.

Sounds like Stockholm syndrome to me!

i chuckled. do you use gps?

> In sum, as exposure to auto traffic volumes and speed decreases, a child’s sense of threat goes down, and his/her ability to establish a richer connection and appreciation for the community rises.

makes sense, intuitively. if you can go play and explore, the memories will reflect it. hide and seek, tag, capture the flag, scrimmages of hockey/basketball/football/soccer will take place. this is a fundamentally fertile area for a young brain to take intellectual nourishment from its environment.

i grew up middle class and in a suburban type place. i can get driven around and not know where i am even a little bit.