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People understand instinctively that the best way for computer programs to communicate with each other is for each of the them to be strict in what they emit, and liberal in what they accept. The odd thing is that people themselves are not willing to be strict in how they speak, and liberal in how they listen. You'd think that would also be obvious. Instead, we're taught to express ourselves.
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It's, uh, pseudo code. Yeah, that's the ticket...
[...]
And 'unicode' is pseudo code for $encoding.
Larry Wall
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Larry's 2nd Law of Language Redesign: Larry gets the colon.
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Let's say the docs present a simplified view of reality...
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Now, I'm not the only language designer with irrationalities. You can think of some languages to go with some of these things.
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It's certainly easy to calculate the average attendance for Perl conferences.
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I don't like this official/unofficial distinction. It sound, er, officious.
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Psychotics are consistently inconsistent. The essence of sanity is to be inconsistently inconsistent.
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The problem with being consistent is that there are lots of ways to be consistent, and they're all inconsistent with each other.
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Remember though that
THERE IS NO GENERAL RULE FOR CONVERTING A LIST INTO A SCALAR.
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One operator is no big deal. That can be fixed in a jiffy.
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Well, sure, I explicitly mentioned 'vtables' last time I brought this up. But a single pointer is fairly paltry, as tables go.
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Well, you can implement a Perl peek() with unpack('P',...). Once you have that, there's only security through obscurity.
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Piet Van Oostrum:
I find this a nice feature but it is not according to the documentation. Or is it a BUG?
Larry Wall:
Let's call it an accidental feature.
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And besides, if Perl really takes off in the Windows space, I think the rest of us would just as soon have a double-agent within ActiveState.
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In Clintonese, that would be 'You are free to infer that I was saying that.'
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I was trying not to mention backtracking. Which, of course, means that yours is 'righter' than mine, in a theoretical sense.
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Lispers are among the best grads of the Sweep-It-Under-Someone-Else's-Carpet School of Simulated Simplicity. [Was that sufficiently incendiary?]
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You want it in one line? Does it have to fit in 80 columns?
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: No comment, since this is still hovering (see Larry's reply).
Flutter, flutter.
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It's getting harder and harder to think out loud. One of these days someone's gonna go off and kill Thomas a'Becket for me...
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You can't have filenames longer than 14 chars. You can't even think about them!
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: I could understand principles of Perl source in 2-3 days [...]
Gee, it took me about eleven years.
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If someone stinks, view it as a reason to help them, not a reason to avoid them.
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I would estimate that the number of programs it breaks in the world will be less than 10. As long as one of those 10 isn't CGI. pm, we're probably okay.
Larry Wall
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Quote of the day
The true spirit of conversation consists in building on another man's observation, not overturning it.
Edward Bulwer-Lytton
Larry Wall
Creative Commons
Born:
September 27, 1954
(age 69)
Bio:
Larry Wall is a computer programmer and author, most widely known as the creator of the Perl programming language.
Known for:
Programming Perl (1991)
Black Perl (1999)
O'Reilly Perl Toolkit (1999)
Most used words:
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language
people
course
reason
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lisp
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