This is a problem with the company's procedures, not with Perl's or modules' licenses.
It is not worth the (mostly unpaid) time of a CPAN author to contact contributors and change the licenses on what may be dozens of modules, because a potential user suffers from bureaucracy.
If the author releases the software hoping that supporting it will generate business (consulting, supporting, or even just reputational) then lowering adoption friction is a good thing making the effort worthwhile.
IMO this is the scenario that most suits the rationale for a permissive license.
If the software is more oriented to hobby users and not intended for businesses to sell it, then it is more up to the author. A well known copyleft license is probably more suited to this scenario as the author can more easily defend the license in court compared to an obscure license.
This is my hypothetical "model train controller software" scenario I described in an earlier post, where the project contibutors celebrate more model train enthusiasts using the software but want want to avoid companies selling binary only proprietary versions.
]]>> Certainly! The regular expression that matches a repeating pattern of two characters that are different from each other is:
(\w)\1
Explanation:
(\w) matches any word character and captures it as the first group.
\1 matches the exact same character as the one captured in the first group.
Therefore, this regular expression will match any repeating pattern of two characters that are different from each other. For example, it will match "abab", "1212", "x1x1", but not "aaa", "111", "xx".
It did get something closer to right when I told it how it was wrong, but you get the idea.
]]>And I did originally say that the ones who were "teaching that it is [hard]" are the incompetent ones. Which you took offense to. Which lead me to assume you were one of the ones doing so, otherwise you would not have felt insulted.
Now you may be the most honest, upright Joe out there but I don't know you and it would be foolish for me to just take you at your word that you have only pure motives and a righteous character after all of that.
]]>He signed his name, with a link to his home page, and Google is your friend. Maybe don't make assumptions about people you don't know without putting in 30 seconds of effort first? I'm pretty sure that if you didn't learn Perl from a book Randal authored or co-authored, you learned it from someone who did. Imagine how much harder it would have been to learn if those books didn't exist?
]]>But that has nothing to do with understanding why in the world he's objecting to saying teachers who tell their students perl is hard should not be teaching computer programming courses.
Perl is not hard. Reading code written by idiots is hard no matter the language and Perl had a pretty good run of being the go-to scripting language, so of course a lot of them wrote in it.
No, I stand by what I said. They're either too incompetent to learn a very easy language or they're talking out of their ass without the experience to even make such a judgment.
]]>Cool! I'm curious, what version of Perl did you start with, and what did you learn it from? I started with Perl 4 around 1993, learning from a co-worker and from "Programming Perl" (aka "the camel book") by Wall and Schwartz.
]]>Yeah, I've read The Camel Book and even still have my original copy. It's an outstanding book. Doesn't mean I know Larry and Randal well enough to call them by their first names or anything though, only what I see in print or video like most everyone else. At home they could be discrete serial killers that really enjoy quilting for all I know.
I wasn't even trying to rip on him, so much as get him to think. If all the comp-sci teachers out there are telling their students that perl is write-only line noise, it's harming the language (a language I happen to quite enjoy writing in) because of their own shortfalls rather than those of the language.
]]>For the past couple decades I've been just deciding to learn $foo and then immediately starting to write an IRC bot in it. I just keep adding extra functions and tweaking it until I think I've learned enough for now or until something else catches my eye.
I did buy quite a few books for reference before online language documentation was ubiquitous so my brain wouldn't have to hold everything itself right from the start though. They have the advantage of being easily findable and able to squash a spider in a pinch. The Camel Book and C By Dissection are probably my favorites in my collection.
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