When there were books only on Perl4 and Perl5, the distinction was easy to do: you had the Fuchsia Camel and the Blue Camel.

Now that there's a new blue kid in town, dedicated to Perl5.6, you cannot say "the Blue Camel" anymore...

Personaly, I don't find Camel 2 and Camel 3 (even with Roman numbers) quite satisfying. At Paris.pm, we discovered what we believe to be a secret message from Larry in the last edition of the Camel. We are quite sure that he knew there would be a problem, and gave us a hint at a solution.

Now, we have distinctive names for the Camel herd:

You don't have to read more than the first 20 pages of the blue Camels to know why we do so.

What do you think about this naming convention, Monks?

Replies are listed 'Best First'.
RE: Fido and Amelia
by Adam (Vicar) on Sep 09, 2000 at 03:01 UTC
    I stopped in a bookstore at lunch to see if I could figure out your joke. (I don't feel like replacing my Camel book yet. I don't think enough has changed.) And the line says, 
    $fido = new Camel 'Amelia';

    [download]
    or something like that. Doesn't that make $fido the new book? Why not Fuchsia, Blue, and Fido?
[reply]
[d/l]

      That's it!

      But if you look in Fido, page 5 or so, you'll notice there's a similar line in a list of examples, that says:

      $fido = new Camel 'Fido';

      So now the "new Camel" is Amelia, and then it was Fido. We are interested in the Camel, not in the scalar variable that holds a reference to it...

      And, well, a lot has changed (in the book, if not in Perl), for example, I heard that the chapter about regular expressions is new and very good (and probably written by Jon).

[reply]
[d/l]
        Incidentally, I once asked Larry what the camel's name was, and he told me it was named Amelia.

[reply]
        Ah! I hadn't spotted $fido on page 5 of my book. Ok then, I'm convinced. Fido and Amelia it is.

        But I still have little intention of buying Amelia anytime soon, as Fido is sufficient for my needs at the moment.

[reply]
RE: Fido and Amelia
by BlaisePascal (Monk) on Sep 08, 2000 at 17:44 UTC
    I don't know much about "Fido" and "Amelia"...it seems too much like an inside joke. Which one is which book again?

    I think it was an unfortunate choice to go with blue for two editions in a row. I know why O'Reilly did so, but that doesn't make it any less confusing now.

    Can we start to petition for Camel 4 to be in a different color? Perl6 will be here in a couple of years, and a new Camel should be right on its heels. A different color would be nice -- or perhaps a two-hump camel instead of a one-hump. Then we'd have a pink (fuchsia) camel, two blue camels, and a two-hump camel.

[reply]

      I don't think O'Reilly will change the Camel's color anymore. Though you know why, I'll write it for the others who might not: this blue is used for everything Perl they do (every book about Perl or close enough, like J. Friedl "Mastering Regular Expressions").

      Fido is "Programming Perl", 2nd ed., while Amelia is "Programming Perl", 3rd ed.

      There seem to be a problem with the work camel as well: Fido's colophon says it's a "camel (one hump dromedary)", while Amelia's colophon says exactly the opposite with "dromedary (one hump camel)". More inside jokes?

[reply]
        Yeah, I don't really get why the coloring is the way it is. I mean, all SysAdmin stuff is Blue, it used to be that all programming was fuchia, but Perl is now light blue while Python is still fuchia, along with C, etc. I like the color coded idea, but don't really understand where they draw the line.
[reply]

Back to Meditations