Anyhow the LotusScript situation is even worse - the other supported languages are Java, C and C++.

C rocks, C++ sort of rocks, and Java, well, I don't mind it too much. I hope you enjoyed the preceeding enlightening, objective analysis about those languages and their respective merits.

Oh I did. So much that I'll ... oh wait. Hmmm. Well whatever I was saying I forgot.

I'm terribly disappointed in what I'm perceiving to be language bigotry elsewhere in this response tree.

There is plenty to complain about when it comes to programming languages. Some are indeed flat out better than others. Just like any other type of design, language designs can suck. Writing criticisms of these sub-par languages off as "language bigotry" is not very constructive. Flame the hell outta advocates of crappy languages instead. It's much more fun.

Nah, I'm just reacting to the (as I write this negative nine) node reputation. I'm imagining that the monks who are voting the node down are just going "eww, VB. I'll moderate *that* node down". I don't know that but that's what I'm guessing.

Imbeach Push!

Honestly, I have a feeling that the node was downvoted because the SOPW apparently did not even attempt to find the solution for their problem. They merely served up some existing code in a different language and pretty much demanded (albeit in a polite way) that someone write the code for him/her.

This is usually frowned upon here at the monestary.

I disagree. I saw two attempts on solving the problem and request for a perl interpretation. The original poster didn't appear to have picked perl on any particular merits except it being "exceptional at text processing". It is perfectly reasonable for this poster to have asked this question this way. Granted - this was only a snippet but that also means it's that also that trivial to answer correctly (not withstanding some other monk's really poor answers).

I had a similar problem earlier this morning (it's 6.30 am here) when I had to solve a problem involving Python and the pickle module. It turns out my solution didn't require me to write Python code but there was a bit where it really looked like I'd have to buckle down and pick some up. The unfortunate part is I'd only be learning the language so I could edit one message in a message archive (mailman's pipermail if you're curious). I went to far as to grab a copy Python source to read Lib/pickle.py, asked on the CB about any perlish ways of accessing pickled data and started to dick into Pythons internals to see how to read my data. All that because there wasn't a pythonmonks.org where I could ask something fundamental like "I'm a perl programmer attempting to solve a Python problem and I need help instantiating a picked object, reading a record, altering it and writing the thing back to disk.".

In this case the Anonymous Monk who posted the question knows VB (at least somewhat) but doesn't know perl. You'd have to assume somewhere that the poster is going to have to learn perl to make use of our answers but from my perspective there's nothing that should prevent the person from asking for help or from getting assistance.

So nyah!

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