e-mail neshura

U.S. Naval Academy '97. I grew up with a Timex Sinclair 1000 and BASIC, and finally got back into computers.

I was just mentioning how interesting the Perl community is.

J. J. Horner

Linux, Perl, Apache, Stronghold, Unix

jhorner@knoxlug.org http://www.knoxlug.org

Oh, you're going to make me cry. I miss my Timex Sinclair. I used it until the button pad gave out finally. I'm considering picking up another one on ebay and writing a web server for fun and (non)profit.

Yeah, the perl community is interesting. I never thought of it as particularly diverse. If anything, the deviation of opinions from the norm is pretty predictable.

e-mail neshura

Hey! The 1st program I wrote was in BASIC! I don't think you could call it a program, but I got it to play the tunes I wanted (literally).

Does anyone remember the HP'85? (85 was just the number, the actual computer was out in 81/82 I think). It had a screwy version of BASIC, that interpreted print output to the attached printer and not to the screen. I'm having a hard time remembering what the print equivalent was now...

#!/home/bbq/bin/perl
# Trust no1!

Hey, we are discovering some common past here. a TS1000 was my first computer. I also used it until the keyboard would not respond anymore. I had the memory expansion, so I had a whooping 16K!

From there to my C64, C128, PC, Unix - and the rest, as they say, is history. I'm getting nostalgic.

--ZZamboni

It's not really as if you held all of your beliefs to yourself :) - when it comes to Microsoft, you also have your causes and crusades. But I think that the spirit of Perl (or maybe rather the spirit of Perlmonks) is not that Perl is the one language that does it all without restricting the single user in how it should be done - at least, Perl's motto is "There is more than one way to do it".

I think it is exactly that spirit of diversity, that draws those different people to Perl and allows both of us to spend time here and learn together.

Sorry, I'm in a "smell the flowers" kind of mood today.

small things are interesting me.

J. J. Horner

Linux, Perl, Apache, Stronghold, Unix

jhorner@knoxlug.org http://www.knoxlug.org

It may be because PerlMonks is young and has a relatively small user base. But I like it. I read almost everything that gets posted, and I have learned a lot since I became a member. I hope we can keep it this way.

--ZZamboni

Ahhhh, you say this now :) When you hear 'how do I remove whitespace from a string?' 1000 times, you become a little tired of it and start telling people to RTFM :) That is why places like c.l.p.misc and EFnet #perl (which I am on) can sometimes seem hostile. I don't always agree with the agressive manner that is sometimes used, but it is easier to help people when you can tell they are trying to help themselves, and not just use everyone else to 'do their homework'.

Cheers,
KM

Ah, but questions like that let the almost-newbies feel good because it is something they know the answer to. It's nice to have questions you can answer even when you're not very skilled yourself.

the ability to cross-reference all sorts of data here with relative ease makes this forum considerably more useful for answering nagging FAQs. if people would just learn to link more often, then instead of RTFM, you can say RTFM or RTFM or even RTFM.