in reply to Searches

Matt Wright came along at a time when the masses were hungry for "plug-n-play" solutions. His poorly coded perl4-style solutions quickly satisfied the crowd.

My web techniques column archive gets many thousands of hits a week, but I'm not playing to the crowd -- I'm playing to the web architecture designer. My stuff's not plug-n-play... you have to have at least half a brain to use them. And those with half a brain or more do in fact know to use my columns as resources, and refer others there frequently.

So the masses still get the oatmeal they deserve, while the connoisseurs like us can dine on fine meat and wines. I have no problem with that.

-- Randal L. Schwartz, Perl hacker

Replies are listed 'Best First'.
Re: Re: Searches
by Trimbach (Curate) on Feb 17, 2001 at 21:18 UTC
    Kind of makes you wonder, though, if there isn't a market for "plug and play" style solutions that aren't so terribly bad as the one's on Matt's site. I mean, like how hard is it to put up (say) a basic, no frills, easy to setup guestbook that does not (at worst) open your server to obvious security holes or (at best) continue a culture of poor programming?

    But I think you're right... Matt's Archive has become a meme that just won't go away, no matter how substandard it is.

    Gary Blackburn
    Trained Killer

[reply]
      I remember a project mentioned on comp.lang.perl.misc about a year ago to rewrite some of the horrid scripts out there. I don't know if this ever made it out of the planning stages. Unfortunately, they called the project CRAP. I'm not sure what the acronym stood for, but it makes it almost impossible to find any information about it via the usual web searches.

      As an aside, maybe we should create some basic tutorials on how to create a guestbook, form mailer, page counter, etc. since these things come up pretty often for new users. It seems like the monastery would be the perfect place for such a thing since we have a wealth of good programmers and an incredibly effective peer review system.

      ----
      Coyote

[reply]

        This was japhy's project. He renamed it to SOAP (Stamp Out Awful Perl), but I don't know what happened to it then.

        --
        <http://www.dave.org.uk>

        "Perl makes the fun jobs fun
        and the boring jobs bearable" - me

[reply]
        I have to disagree with the last part...
          I think that this will change the "face" of the monastery to become like any commercial site, and stray away from the feel of the community that is going on around here..

        Please don't make the monastery a place for trading guestbooks, and form mailers...

        I agree with the tutorials part...

        Chady | http://chady.net/
[reply]
      Yikes! I typed "guestbook perl" into google.com and sure enough the top link returned was a guestbook that said it was written with code from Matt's Script Archive.

      If even Google.com, which I consider the prince of search engines, gets it wrong then what hope is there?

[reply]

        Unfortunately, Google is doing the right thing there. It's returning the web page that most people want when searching for Perl guestbooks. You can't expect Google to give a qualitative analysis of the data at each the links it lists :(

        --
        <http://www.dave.org.uk>

        "Perl makes the fun jobs fun
        and the boring jobs bearable" - me

[reply]
Re: Re: Searches
by Ignorance (Monk) on Feb 19, 2001 at 07:02 UTC
    " If you make something even an idiot can use,
    an idiot will use it. "
[reply]

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