petdance (u/petdance)

petdance commented on SUSE Donates USD 11,500 to the Perl and Raku Foundation perl.com/article/suse-don... · Posted by u/oalders

geodel · 22 days ago

Reminds me story

Once a little boy, old man and their donkey traveling on feet.

First passerby "What morons, they have donkey and no one is riding on it. So boy sits on donkey.

Second passerby "Look, what a shame, young lad sitting on donkey and poor old man is forced to walk on feet. So they swap.

Third passerby "Wow, this grownup adult is riding donkey while little kid is walks in hot sun. So they both sit on donkey.

Fourth passerby "Amazing, just amazing, two able bodied people riding on this poor animal. Can't they at least take turns like a decent human."

petdance · 22 days ago

No matter what you do, at least one person will be unhappy about it.

petdance commented on Proxmox Donates €10k to the Perl and Raku Foundation perl.com/article/proxmox-... · Posted by u/oalders

0cf8612b2e1e · a month ago

This happens every time. Company does good thing. “But, why didn’t they do 2X good thing?!”

Working for a F500 company, I have tried to use budget surplus to reward open source projects we use. Management looked at me like I had grown an additional head.

petdance · a month ago

> I have tried to use budget surplus to reward open source projects we use.

"We've never heard of that happening, so no."

petdance commented on Proxmox Donates €10k to the Perl and Raku Foundation perl.com/article/proxmox-... · Posted by u/oalders

neuroelectron · a month ago

Perl? Wow. I'm a big fan of perl, but I gotta say I thought it was dead. Despite, the dynamic features of the language, I feel like it's much mote secure and mature than other modern convenience languages like JS/TS and Python. It certainly is much faster in general.

petdance · a month ago

What does "dead" mean?

petdance commented on Proxmox Donates €10k to the Perl and Raku Foundation perl.com/article/proxmox-... · Posted by u/oalders

oofbey · a month ago

The TIOBE index says Perl is currently the #11 most popular programming language (up from #30 a year ago). ref: https://www.tiobe.com/tiobe-index/

Now, I don't actually believe this, because that puts Perl way ahead of Rust (currently at #18). So the big thing I'm taking away from this little research post is that I no longer trust the Tiobe index. Too bad - it felt pretty reliable for a long time.

petdance · a month ago

I suggest that there are no meaningful conclusions to be gleaned from the TIOBE rankings.

petdance commented on Proxmox Donates €10k to the Perl and Raku Foundation perl.com/article/proxmox-... · Posted by u/oalders

bluGill · a month ago

I've long tried to figure out how we can donate to projects. If we were to buy/license those tools it would cost thousands of dollars, but I don't know how to get any money for the free tools we use. When I ask half of management doesn't understand the question, and the rest don't know either.

petdance · a month ago

Can you dedicate employee time to help on the projects?

petdance commented on Proxmox Donates €10k to the Perl and Raku Foundation perl.com/article/proxmox-... · Posted by u/oalders

aaronbaugher · a month ago

It's unfortunate that that wasn't clear to people who weren't closely involved with Perl at the time. So many people got the impression that Perl 5 was outdated as soon as 6 was in development, so they thought they had to move on from it. It's too bad Raku didn't have a different name from the start.

petdance · a month ago

> It's too bad Raku didn't have a different name from the start.

We thought that it would take a year or two, not decades.

Also, the intent was to have a Perl 5 compatibility mode.

petdance commented on Why do we call it “boilerplate code?” buttondown.email/hillelwa... · Posted by u/goranmoomin

fumeux_fume · 3 years ago

At a certain point, the slang term "boilerplate" branched away from the derogatory sense in reference to newspapers to the more neutral sense of formulaic. The first "neutral" sense reference in the OED is from 1949:

Navy Contract Law (U.S. Bureau Naval Personnel) ix. 212/2 -- "This type of clause has proved so valuable that it is presently standard ‘boilerplate’ not only in shipbuilding contracts but also in almost every kind of contract."

The first reference in the OED for it being used w/r/t computer stuff is 1990:

L. Wall & R. L. Schwartz Programming Perl vii. 379 -- "Like mus itself, man2mus is not 100% effective, but can save you a lot of time producing the initial boilerplate."

petdance · 3 years ago

The reference to "Programming Perl" was no doubt helped along by Perl developer Jesse Sheidlower who worked at the OED in the early 2000s. From his Wikipedia page: "Although not a computer programmer by training, Sheidlower introduced Perl to the North American offices of Oxford University Press and developed tools for data manipulation when no programmers were available. He is also one of the core developers of Catalyst, a popular Perl web development framework."

petdance commented on Perl, the first postmodern computer language (1999) wall.org/~larry/pm.html... · Posted by u/takiwatanga

forgotmypw17 · 3 years ago

I love Perl. I use almost none of its more esoteric features, and just write "classic procedural" code, mostly using command-line utilities instead of third-party modules for anything I don't want to write myself (mainly cryptography), and I am so fucking happy not having to deal with breaking changes in my language, a rare quality these days.

I used a machine with a 9-year-old distro on it for a few months, and all my scripts ran without issue, and I have high confidence that they will continue to run for years down the road without my having to adjust them for breaking changes in the language runtime, which is more than I can say for most other stacks I've used.

Furthermore, ALL the code examples I can google up will work without me having to check if they're for the right version of Perl, because it has near-perfect backwards compatibility going back all the way to 5.000 from 1994.

About the only other thing with a comparable level of stability has been HTML/JS/CSS, which gets a lot of new features all the time, but, for the most part, if I use only minimal features, remains usable for years without modification.

petdance · 3 years ago

> I use almost none of its more esoteric features

Which features do you see as esoteric?

petdance commented on Ack is a grep-like source code search tool beyondgrep.com/... · Posted by u/graderjs

jedisct1 · 3 years ago

It's pretty old, and there are better/faster alternatives these days, such as ugrep.

petdance · 3 years ago

What makes ugrep better for your use cases?

petdance commented on Feature comparison of ack, ag, Git-grep, grep and ripgrep beyondgrep.com/feature-co... · Posted by u/Amorymeltzer

oxplot · 4 years ago

Hmm — there is a project that allows you to compile a single binary that is cross platform across Linux, Mac and Windows. Wondering if ripgrep can be compiled in such a way and that would make it very close to the portability you have with ack.

petdance · 4 years ago

That still might run afoul of locked down networks like I've seen at banks. Users couldn't install any binaries at all, but with something like ack it's just cut & paste some text into a text file. ack can literally be a select-all, Ctrl-C, switch windows, "cat > ack", Ctrl-V.