It's been a while since anyone called me a punk. It was probably 1977 and as I was listening to the Sex Pistols at the time the description was probably accurate.

I'll admit that it's been at least a couple of years since I looked at your scripts. I'll take another look just as soon as Extropia comes back up and I'll report back with my opinions. If you're interested, I'll be measuring them against the criteria that I list in my article Finding CGI Scripts.

I certainly can't claim to have inspired a thousand web developers, but I know I've saved hundreds of web sites from using Matt Wright's scripts by running the nms project. In my opinion this has also been worked on by "some of the best perl developers from around the world". I wonder if they were the same ones as worked on your project :)

"The first rule of Perl club is you do not talk about Perl club."
-- Chip Salzenberg

It is 1:16 in Malaysia where I am, so I will definitely stop after this. :)

12kashe, you're right that I should not have let the posters before me, who were attacking me personally, get me riled. Just water under th bridge right?

You are right in this.

Unfortunately, I am just so sick and tired of this kind've post and needed a bit of vent.

Sadly, it is the lack of respect that you state as being foundational to the community which I believe was there in the beginning but which is no longer there, that has finally driven me out of the perl community altogether.

The irony is that I was just speaking to an old time friend who was trying to convince me in his own way, to come back and I was actually thinking about it.

Then I get unsolicited mail from one of the monks telling me to read this thread. So I did, and it really hurt my feelings.

So, fine. I reacted poorly, you are right. Nevertheless, I have other things to do.

Next time, when someone starts a thread about someone else's work as "Ignorant" maybe you will step in a bit sooner beacuse, regardless of the fact that I should not have 'continued' it, it was lack of respect that started this.

Thanks for coming back and stating this.

Your right that it can be painful when your personal work is targeted. Your also right it can be difficult to bite your tongue, especially when you feel strongly that the initiator doesn't know what they are talking about.

But we honestly do have a fairly solid, understanding community here. Its the reason I actually created an account here, and continue coming back day after day. Perlmonks really is a breath of fresh air compared to many of the communities out there.

So I'm glad you cleared the air, and I'm sorry I was so blunt. I just simply couldn't allow the thread to continue in that manner.

On a side note, I think the article was fairly accurate. While there have been improvements (mod_perl, fastcgi, et all) the state problems, and the server load haunted admins for a long time. Also alot of CGI in the wild was one persons code, copied and pasted in alot of places, and not really optomized for the environment it was in, nor the language it was written in.

Sorry to leave a bad taste in your mouth, but maybe you should troll around a bit and see what we have to offer. One case in point is a new monk xmath. He dived right in the first day here creating a new module along the lines of Dumper, with nothing out there scratching his itch. Since then he was asked why reinvent that wheel, why not patch existing modules, etc.. Now I believe a portion of the monks here are actively helping to debug and extend the module. Such is life in the monastary, as it should be.

sub nit { print "Its L2Kashe\nThink processors :)\n"; }

happy hacking


/* And the Creator, against his better judgement, wrote man.c */

Maybe Dave isn't merely claiming to be better, after all. He and friends at London.pm have spent a fair amount of time creating properly written drop-in replacements for Matt's scripts.

Your article is also mixing up many levels of things. That CGI scripts produce ugly pages is a ridiculous claim; they can send to the browser any output they wish to, just like all other dynamic webpage generation technology can. It is true that state is hard to maintain in CGI, but so is it with any other dynamic webpage generation technology because HTTP itself, the protocol on which all them have to build, is inherently stateless. (Whoever claimed cookies were the solution forgets they're conceptually the same thing as hidden fields, which by the way is exactly the same thing as encoding data in the URL at least for GET forms so your article's separate mention is redundant.)

Makeshifts last the longest.

While I'd agree that conceptually cookies and hidden fields are similar -- they both offer ways to maintain state within the confines of a stateless protocol -- I would argue that they are, in fact, different enough for separate discussion. There are RFC's for cookies that make their use much more predictable than hidden fields. And they have features like expirations that you'd have to build into a hidden fields implementation.

I'm not arguing that any one state mechanism is better or worse. But they are different. I've used them both for different situations. The advantage of good abstractions and wrappers is that they provide a consistent state-saving API regardless of the underlying method(s) used. This may be what Selena/Eric was referring to with J2EE. To my knowledge it only hides it all under a consistent API, but still uses cookies (usually) or hidden fields as the mechanism. I always throw those "encoded in the URL" state-saving methods into the same bucket as hidden fields, but one could argue that as another, distinct method with its own distinct merits. IMO, A really good API defaults to whatever is available so that there's no real dependency. i.e., if cookies are disabled use another method. Selena/Eric's knock on CGI may be that there is no such layering there. I'd argue that for that you pick a higher level abstraction.

Yet another flamefest at Perlmonks? Count me in.

I know just enough to have inspired a thousand web developers,

Yeah, inspired them to write secure, maintainable, bug-free code. Inspired them to only release code they feel will contribute something. Inspired them to contribute to central code repositories (like cpan) to minimize needless duplication of effort and encourage peer review. In other words, inspired them to write code completely different than yours.

written books

Have you looked at the quality of most Perl books lately? They suck. I haven't read any of yours, nor do I intend to. There is a small minority of excellent Perl books such as Data Munging with Perl written by the guy you're flaming who is exponentially more respected than you in the Perl community.

spoken at conferences and won awards, and solved lots of problems people were having both technically and not.

Spoken on what? How not to program, using your own code as examples? What awards? Matt Wright's insecure programming & open spam relay awards? As for solving problems, I'm pretty sure you're creating just as many for anyone who will maintain that spaghetti code of yours.

Does that mean I am a guru?

Yuck, you just wrecked a perfectly good word. Now I'm going to have refer to the likes of Elian, davorg, TheDamian, merlyn, tye, Abigail-II and others as something totally different.

It is no secret that I am not a programmer and I have no intention of being one.

If you write code, you are a programmer. Check the dictionary definition if you'd like. You can't just totally suck and say "well I'm not a programmer." Keep your garbage code to yourself, you're corrupting minds that could be molded into doing something productive.

I still know that there would be a hundred punks like you claiming to be better.

Punks? Now that's not very nice. And yes, if you did consider yourself a "programming guru" there would be a hundred (actually, more like hundreds of thousands) of people who would consider themselves more skilled than you, and rightfully so. Kind of like the current situation now isn't it?

As far as my archive goes, it is a valuable resource which you obviously have not bothered to truly investigate

Actually, I did a survey, 80% of people say it was useless crap, the other 20% asked me what the pretty dollar signs mean. There is tonnes of excellent code out there, no need to very poorly duplicate it's functionality.

As an open source project,some of the best perl developers from around the world have contributed to it

Once again, Matt Wright isn't one of the best perl developers in the world, and he definately wasn't one of them 5 years ago (sorry Matt, you just make a good example ;-). And while those 500 monkeys randomly typing on 500 typewriters did turn out substantially better code than you, it still wasn't that good.

and the current architecture is far superior to any applicaiton development framework for Perl CGI that exists today.

Damn, I just threw up. My stomach couldn't handle that last sentence. Guess you won ;-P

Heh, </flame> that was fun, we should do it again sometime. This entire post is meant as a half-joke so don't take it too seriously, just remember to look at your work objectively and ask yourself if it really does contribute something before publicizing it. If you feel it does, more power to you, but don't do it just for your egos sake :).

Have a nice day :)