Posts by Anonymous Monk
repl.it has a perl problem in Meditations
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by Anonymous Monk
on Oct 25, 2018 at 15:23
    This is ridiculous: repl.it/languages
Perl 11 in Perl News
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by Anonymous Monk
on Oct 23, 2018 at 21:08
If 6 Was 9 in Meditations
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by Anonymous Monk
on Oct 15, 2018 at 14:00
    You know that feeling, when the big program you've been working on approaches completion, and you're scanning for those invisible bugs the others will find when running your code. That's when I saw something like this somewhere between lines 6000 and 7000:
    my $one = 1; my $six = my $nine = 9; print $six; # prints 9
    I didn't know you could chain lexical declarations like that! The bug survived for months because $nine was 0 and $six was supposed to be an empty string. Playing around with it reveals more questionable behavior:
    #!/usr/bin/perl -l use strict; use warnings; use diagnostics; print my $J = my $A = my $P = my $H = 'Just',' Another ','Perl',' Hacker';
    Does that look strict? :-)
Perhaps it's time to look at Perl 6 ? in Meditations
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by Anonymous Monk
on Oct 12, 2018 at 22:48
    Interesting meditation on Perl from a programmer dealing with a "complete nightmare" after 8 years of Beautiful is better than ugly:

    https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18182921


    "But seriously, many computer scientists have fallen into the trap of trying to define languages like George Orwell’s Newspeak, in which it is impossible to think bad thoughts. What they end up doing is killing the creativity of programming.

    A more insidious trap, promulgated in many places these days (including the most recent Discover magazine), is that a computer program should be beautiful. Let me tell you that when it comes to computer languages, this is totally bogus. If you want to do beautiful art, you don’t go out and buy a beautiful canvas, and a beautiful brush, and a beautiful palette, and slather beautiful paints on it. If you want to write beautiful poetry, this doesn’t happen because you started with a beautiful language. Languages are an artistic medium. I don’t want Perl to be beautiful–I want you to write beautiful programs in Perl.

    Finally, I believe that any language essentially should be out of control, because no one person or institution is capable of controlling a language (or a culture, for that matter) without destroying it. Living languages are always a cooperative effort, and I want Perl to be a living language."

    From https://www.perl.com/pub/1997/wall/keynote.html


Is WebPerl the Holy Grail* of universal cross-platform Perl app distribution? in Meditations
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by Anonymous Monk
on Oct 11, 2018 at 12:05
    # Is WebPerl the Holy Grail* of universal # cross-platform Perl app distribution? $_=q` ______________ | PERLAPP | <- Your Perl app here. |_____|______| ______v_______ | WEBPERL | <- The Holy Grail* |_____^______| | | | | <- Internet. ______|____|__ | BROWSER v | <- Everywhere! | WEBPERLAPP | <- Downloaded! |____________| ______|_______ | WINDOWS | <- Anything... | LINUX | | MAC | | ETC | |____________| * Of universal cross-platform Perl application distribution. `and print
Perl Web Security: 15 years of lessons not learned by inferior new languages in Meditations
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by Anonymous Monk
on Oct 10, 2018 at 14:25
    2001: Perl CGI HTTP_PROXY bug fixed! (by Merlyn :-)
    www.nntp.perl.org/group/perl.libwww/2001/03/msg2249.html

    15 years before nginx:
    www.securityfocus.com/bid/91819/references

    15 years before Apache:
    nvd.nist.gov/vuln/detail/CVE-2016-5387

    15 years before PHP:
    nvd.nist.gov/vuln/detail/CVE-2016-5385

    15 years before Python:
    bugs.python.org/issue27568

    15 years before Go (Golang):
    nvd.nist.gov/vuln/detail/CVE-2016-5386


    Who do you trust?

    LOL: httpoxy.org/#why

    2018-10-21 Athanasius changed <h1> tags to <h3>

The joy of Perl, 20 years later in Meditations
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by Anonymous Monk
on Oct 09, 2018 at 10:55
Writing Popular Perl Software in Meditations
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by Anonymous Monk
on Oct 07, 2018 at 20:27

    Writing Popular Perl Software

    Recently https://perl.com published a list of top keywords for their googsearch:

    https://github.com/tpf/perldotcom/projects

    Having this information is like asking a sentient billion human brain AI the question, "perl"?

    The answer was nine nouns in precedential order:

    $ perl? $ sql linux python mysql cgi regex foreach cpan download $ _

    The world needs Perl to:

    1. Interact with SQL databases.
    2. Work with Linux.
    3. Do something (with, about, for, etc) Python.
    4. Interact with MySQL databases.
    5. Provide the Common Gateway Interface.
    6. Match regular expressions.
    7. Process each item in a list.
    8. Expand through modules.
    9. Download!

    From https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google_data_centers#Production_hardware

    "As of 2014, Google used a heavily customized version of Debian (GNU/Linux). They migrated from a Red Hat-based system incrementally in 2013."

    From https://wiki.debian.org/Perl

    "Perl is just another high level programming language that supports object-oriented, procedural and/or functional programming.

    Lot of Debian and GNU tools, use Perl. Lot of system core components, packaging internals and other critical points, rely on Perl versions.

    If you've some unmet requirements about the Perl interpreter version, TIMTOWTDI

    (There Is More Than One Way To Do It)

    2018-10-20 Athanasius removed code tags, added paragraph tags, linkified links, etc.

The war against Perl, by random wikipedia editors in Meditations
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by Anonymous Monk
on Aug 23, 2018 at 22:13
    For many years Perl was part of the Model–view–controller page at wikipedia. At some point the Catalyst and Maypole links were quietly deleted and now everything except Perl gets a nod. This is not an isolated incident.

    Of course anyone can edit wikipedia: Let's put Perl back on the map!

use Memoize; in Meditations
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by Anonymous Monk
on Jul 16, 2018 at 15:18
    I was porting a script to a module and noticed it kept getting slower. The script could initialize its expensive data structure once at the top and be done with it, but in order to encapsulate, the module was calling the function several times. I remembered the core module Memoize and added one line to the top of the program and now it runs fast again, 4x faster than without Memoize!
    
    use Memoize; memoize('some_sub');
    
    
    Only 1.5 seconds to start a program that was taking 6 seconds!