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smonff

254 karma · joined August 15, 2012

https://hi.balik.network
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smonff··on Show HN: Yoink – Spotify to lossless with full metadata, self-hostable, ad-free
YouTube / Google too.
smonff··on Who are the companies that still use Perl in their back end?
Perl is not trendy. Companies, even those that use it extensively never communicate about it and there are no publicly visible ads on job boards. Doesn’t mean that there’s not code to maintain and projects building up.

Personally I never had a Perl contract by searching for the companies. I identified as a Perl specialist on my LinkedIn profile and some people searching for help contacted me.

Recently I have been contacted by some headhunters for something about « defense » in UK but did not manage to know more about it. Also check « aviation in Brusells », or « billing, payment, finance » in France.

For public sector: EPFL (Lausanne science and technology university and labs) and Genève public judiciary system. May be in the process of rewriting to other languages, as booking.com does (Java notably). But there will be legacy code still.

Also, banks!

smonff··on Who are the companies that still use Perl in their back end?
Maybe for web crawlers too.
smonff··on Perl articles are being memory wiped from Wikipedia
Still active and relevant for some people from those communities, though. Without mentioning the historic value.
smonff··on Perl articles are being memory wiped from Wikipedia
It’s not a kingdom, but a monestary, and that’s exactly what the WikiPedia article explained.

https://www.perlmonks.com/?node_id=3559

smonff··on Perl articles are being memory wiped from Wikipedia
Google index is tailored for each individual. Persons with interest in breeding cats won’t be served Perl results.

If Google index becomes a criterion of notability, we are in a deep deep shit.

smonff··on Perl articles are being memory wiped from Wikipedia
Some of the deleted pages never had the « sources missing » tag set for a significative time. It has been straight to deletion point.

Some pages that survived the deletion (e.g. TPRF) had the « missing sources » tag set since 15 years… What, I have to admit, can justify some action. But it was not the case for the PerlMonks and Perl Mongers pages: those just got deleted on an extremely short notice, making it impossible for the community to attempt any improvement.

smonff··on Perl articles are being memory wiped from Wikipedia
I makes very hard to re-start a new article. Why start from scratch when we could re-use and improve the old article? This is discouraging.

I am moderately tech-savvy and had a WikiPedia account for years. But going into the deletion-review process WikiPedia bureaucracy is a lot of work. Pretty honestly I looked at the process and it looks so complicated that I think I would rather write a brand new article.

smonff··on Perl articles are being memory wiped from Wikipedia
This « rule » is infuriating. Google searches are tailored to serve us content that might interest us. In this case, Google search first page returns plenty of notable results for me. Might not be the case for a person interested in geology and dogs, though.

How could such a biased thing be a valid WikiPedia criteria?

smonff··on DuckDuckGo Donates $25,000 to The Perl and Raku Foundation v2025
What about maintaining the codebases that got written 25 years ago? Those still exist and needs care to stay operational. Sometimes there’s no point rewriting to the next trendy language, although it can be obligatory, if it’s impossible for the company to find skilled workers, because everybody moved to a different language ecosystem.
smonff··on Geizhals Preisvergleich Donates USD 10k to the Perl and Raku Foundation
Relying on large donation sponsors make the situation unstable when loosing only one sponsor?
smonff··on Please don't force dark mode
I hope Spotify UX teams reached this.
smonff··on A New Logo for Perl
There are ways to enforce good practices and collective code style.

Take a look at perltidy and perlcritic.

smonff··on A New Logo for Perl
I am one of the person who did the « heavy lifting » on this logo. One of the versions I contributed were actually inspired by the Clojure logo, so, I guess you are both right.

In this discarded version[1], the camel hump is used to create a « dune » in the background. I would have think it was the best, but we discarded it during the review sessions.

[1] https://github.com/metacpan/perl-assets/blob/main/experiment...

smonff··on Are Overemployed 'Ghost Engineers' Making Six Figures to Do Nothing?
It’s interesting the study and toolkit is focusing on engineers. What about engineers management?
smonff··on The Perl and Raku Conference 2024 is looking for sponsors
What band would it be ?
smonff··on Open Letter to Tim O’Reilly to Free the Perl Camel
More thoughts about this, inspired by the ongoing talk https://dev.to/smonff/notes-about-the-ongoing-perl-logo-disc...
smonff··on Rust is a hard way to make a web API
Inefficient for what? Are Perl regexps inefficient? No, they are the best. Isn't Python's Django efficient at producing full web applications in no-time with decent performances and that can be maintainable? Maybe you are speaking of the way jQuery don't work at managing the reactive interfaces of half of the websites since 2006?

Who spoke of efficiency. Everything is inefficient. Are cars efficient? No. You use less time at walking your way than using a car and working to pay your car. Plus they are dirty.

I have to admit that I forgot Java that have the most efficient object system in the world: btw I got trained on it and spent half of my career coding Java. I just tried to quote stuff I wasn't familiar with.

smonff··on Ask HN: Anyone else burnt out due to extended lockdown and work-from-home?
After an intense period of work from november 2010 to mai 2011, I burned-out because staying at home, working all nighter, not seeing real people, having my desk twenty centimeters from bed, and everything. It was not even lockdown or curfews.

Lockdown is just yet another reason why you may burn out. Personally, I have social anxiety, so I didn't care much in the first time, but in fact, not seeing people is just awful.

smonff··on Rust is a hard way to make a web API
Don't believe the hype. Rust and Go are nice, but 95% of the time you don't need those. Especially when I read about the fact that it is "developed by Google for their own needs", I mean, you surely not work for Google. Same with React: you are (maybe) not a Facebook engineer that must work on one of the most complex front end of the world.

Just use stuff that works, and that most people already know. Python, Perl, Ruby, jQuery, PHP, etc. Any of those have all the tools you need, proper documentation, millions of Stack Overflow discussions, and exceptional ecosystems and communities.

I am a Perl enthusiast since more than ten years. Personnal opinion, feel free to ignore it. It got the incredible [Mojolicious](https://mojolicious.org) framework that makes possible to deploy a full API through a oneliner. I know everybody hates Perl (especially for web development), but I am really tired of all the re-inventing the wheels.

I would never study another languages. I am forty. I am tired.

smonff··on How much math you need for programming (2014)
You basically need almost no maths knowledge to learn programming. This is the first thing the person that trained me told us. Especially for fields like web development and stuff. Sure, if you need to send rockets to mars, it's not the same.

With 12 years of experience, I would say this is true. I would even say that my fucked up logic makes me a very good debugger.

smonff··on [dead]
Since the 90's, Perl, always there for you
smonff··on We can do better than DuckDuckGo
DDG is a search engine that respect your privacy. DDG doesn't put you in a « bubble » based on your location, search history, your browsing history, physical moves, time of day, country of residence, IP, and billions parameters I don't know about. Therefore, there are things that cannot be done, like Google or Bing do.

Google is like an oracle because it exploit all of this. And it works, with a cost for your privacy (but maybe you are ok to pay it). DDG is more a "meta-search-engine" with limited capabilities. Bit you got the flexibility of accessing the search engines of thousand of websites.

If you don't care for your privacy, don't use DDG and stay with Google.

smonff··on A fun website that simulates fluid
Really? That's really a shame you know. Solving the anxiety of suffering people is already not that bad.
smonff··on Web Scraping with JavaScript
Please don't.
smonff··on [dead]
26466 issues? I would have burned-out long time ago...
smonff··on Google is apparently taking down all/most Fediverse apps from the Play Store
Wait? Isn't the Fediverse full of nazis, freeze-peachers and non-moderated unsafe instances? Oh, yes!

There we are. When framapiaf.org, mamot.fr and other "free speech" and "anti-censorship floss activists" will start to apply a proper moderation and clear blocks of fascists instances and users, maybe Google would reconsider to publish the Android clients on Google Play.

Those spaces are totally out of control and this is a part of the problem.

smonff··on Google is apparently taking down all/most Fediverse apps from the Play Store
True. This is not censorship. People can still direct-download the APK from Github or from an alternative apps Store.
smonff··on Google is apparently taking down all/most Fediverse apps from the Play Store
Middle size Mastodon instance moderator here.

When I see the amount of people registering with Gmail accounts on the Fediverse when it is supposed to be a tech giants escape (Twitter here but still) and then complaining and crying about a "Google Play ban", I am laughing very very strong.

smonff··on The Lounge – Modern web IRC client designed for self-hosting
Reminds me a bit of [Convos](https://convos.chat/), a nice Perl based client.
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