Aristotle

• Website: plasmasturm.org/
• About: Waxing philosophical

Recent Actions

• Posted Dodging the Go loop trap to Aristotle

  Ted Unangst:

  And now we’re trapped. There’s only one friend variable, constantly changing a…

• Commented on The Hidden Power of Prototypes
  That seems interesting in the sense of “may you live in interesting times” 😛 Another possibly useful prototype is the underscore (“_”), which allows functions to default to $_ when given no argument, like e.g. chr and hex do....
• Commented on No One Is Immune to Abuse
  You seem to be concerned about people liking you, so it could be anybody. Buzzard, Buzzard. If you go around accusing people of not knowing the difference between empathy and sympathy, maybe you should not be making the same mistake....
• Commented on No One Is Immune to Abuse
  Hey, the guy who doesn’t care is back to reaffirm his not caring. Welcome back. 🙂 Of course I’ma do me. Who else?...
• Commented on No One Is Immune to Abuse
  And yet, Dave. This article, which took days to compile and just as long to carefully brush out any polemic so it would stick entirely to facts and technical arguments… evidently nevertheless registered as an attack when published. It was...
• Commented on No One Is Immune to Abuse
  Hmm. I almost left Perl because of Sawyer’s stewardship. And I mostly dropped out of the community because watching the giant flamewar caused by the technical decisions he intended to pursue made me miserable. The exhaustion of bracing for the...
• Commented on Next stable DBD::SQLite will be released at the beginning of November
  Hi Doug, a blog comment column is probably not the best venue to raise a request of this nature. A mailing list or the issue tracker seem more suitable. And hey, look: https://github.com/DBD-SQLite/DBD-SQLite/issues/101 — sound familiar?...
• Commented on Profiling Perl under Apache
  Ah. That story is somewhat more complicated. These days when people say “Markdown” they mean a somewhat extended version of the syntax that most sites have converged on, whereas the Markdown plugin in use here is the O.G. Gruber Perl...
• Commented on Profiling Perl under Apache
  <code> does not work on the bash code above (adds some colours, but renders everything in a single wrapping line with the regular font) That is the opposite of not working. 🙂 You have to use it, like you would...
• Posted “Let Maintainers Be Maintainers” to Aristotle

  Graydon Hoare:

  […] Corporate-employed FOSS maintainers working at a firm with these [very common] “growth and novelty” incentives [… are…

• Commented on Mojocast #4: Stash, Flash, and Sessions
  This entry was posted in 2011. As early as 2013 the site was redirecting to some post on Google Plus (remember that thing?) which has since been lost, and unsurprisingly the domain was for sale half a year later. I...
• Commented on The first line of Perl_CGI script, env perl vs perl only, how different?
  Avoiding doing things on the shebang line is a matter of coding style and therefore subjective. There is a much more important reason to avoid -w, which is objective: it’s not at all the same thing as use warnings. Whereas...
• Posted Template Toolkit’s DEFAULT is not too useful to Aristotle

  Quoth the fine manual for Template Toolkit:

  The DEFAULT directive is similar t…

• Commented on This week in PSC (099)
  https://github.com/Perl/RFCs...
• Commented on Outstanding GitHub Items
  Certainly! I didn’t mean it as any kind of discouragement at all. I’ve just been compiling this kind of query for a while, and since you’re posting about it, I thought my collection would be of interest. (It’s not 7...
• Commented on Outstanding GitHub Items
  Way ahead of you. 🙂...
• Commented on ChatGPT suggests new keywords for Perl
  Of course that example already works exactly as described if you use my. There is no need for let in Perl. All ChatGPT can do is generate a plausible response to a prompt. Here's a question. Were any of these...
• Commented on How to prevent an infinite loop
  Filed as https://github.com/Perl/perl5/issues/20708....
• Posted How to prevent an infinite loop to Aristotle

  This loop (assuming you have an /etc/passwd and may read it) runs forever:

  while () {
    open my $fh, '<:unix', '/etc/passwd' or die $!;
  }

  This loop terminates:

  while () {
    open my $fh, '', '/etc/…

• Commented on Cannot change password
  Hi. I fixed this the other day. It was always possible to change your password using the password reset procedure, or else you could log into the MT backend and use the profile edit form there to change your password....
• Commented on PSA: Changing your b.p.o password is recommended
  Good point. That had been reported three separate times over the years. Unfortunately those all came in during the era when learned helplessness was the attitude toward MovableType, and the fact that there was a workaround (the one which you...
• Posted PSA: Changing your b.p.o password is recommended to Meta

  HTTPS support on blogs.perl.org, announced last month, has now undergone some additional small improvements to prevent the previously still theoretically possible exposure of session cookies in unencrypted requests.

  As such, now …

• Commented on Good bye PrePAN
  That’s a reasonable suggestion, but also feels like it’s missing the point in a way. My sense is that whoever ran the site lost interest in keeping it online, and the registration lapsing was just a symptom of that. Moving...
• Posted Good bye PrePAN to Aristotle

  The domain was snapped up by a squatter sometime between July and August. 🙁 What a pity, I always enjoyed those conversations.

• Posted New feature: HTTPS support to Meta

  The site is now served over HTTPS.

• Commented on TPF launches merch store for Perl 5
  The raptor is a Mojo creation. Incorrect. All three logos in fact go back to remarks by Larry, including the velociraptor. The earliest reference to the velociraptor by Larry that I can find is in Apocalpyse 12, where he only...
• Commented on On interpolating stuff into pattern matches
  Yeah, this time, as I was writing a comment on your entry and it was getting longer and longer I did think that hold on, we had this conversation before. 🙂...
• Posted On interpolating stuff into pattern matches to Aristotle

  Tom Wyant:

  Interestingly (to me, at least) they reported that the removal of the /o modifier made their case 2-3 times slower. This surprised me som…

• Commented on RFC: new API for Type::Params
  I really dislike marketing/judgy terms like “modern” for this kind of thing. “Modern” conveys nothing about the interface, it’s just what someone thinks of it – or rather, thought of it at the time the term was assigned. Next time...
• Commented on RFC: new API for Type::Params
  Wouldn’t it be close enough to update the documentation to prominently describe only the new style, and for the old interface just put some stubs near the end of the POD that merely say stuff like (e.g.) this? compile_named_oo(...): does...

Comment Threads

• The Mighty Buzzard commented on No One Is Immune to Abuse

  No worries, Dave, I wouldn't work with you either. You don't know the difference between empathy and sympathy for starters. I understand how you feel perfectly well, I just don't care unless it's how you feel about the code.

  You need to get out of the cubicle or your house and carry some tools for a while. It'll get rid of your fragility and desire to coddle those who run and cry to HR for being called a dumbass when they're objectively being a dumbass.

• The Mighty Buzzard commented on No One Is Immune to Abuse

  You do you, Aristotle. I've never worked a job a day in my life where the boss, much less plenty of the employees, wasn't an asshole. And yet I've never once quit a job because I didn't like someone. I'm not there to like or be liked, I'm there to get a job done. If I receive something in return for the work that I value enough, I continue working; if not, I don't.

  That's where a lot of people read me wrong. It's not that I hate their breathing guts. It's that I don't care about them enough to give a damn if they take my complete indifference to their entire existence except as it ap…

• The Mighty Buzzard commented on No One Is Immune to Abuse

  Beats me. You seem to be concerned about people liking you, so it could be anybody.

  Most of the overly fragile people are not in reality overly fragile anyway. They simply hate you and will use the weapon you're giving them every time you fail to slap them down for doing it to others against you.

  The choice here is between demanding they act like a grownup who leaves his non-work feelings at home or letting them run everyone who gets things done off. There is not a middle ground, only an inevitable decline if you allow it.

• Diab Jerius commented on No One Is Immune to Abuse

  Lots of stereotypes and assumptions being thrown around here, as well as some pretty grand generalizations.

  A community is defined by a set of common values and yes, a code of conduct of acceptable behavior. That's been part of human culture since before recorded history.

  Every community eventually sets down rules for what is acceptable and what isn't, otherwise it falls apart and is no longer a community.

  Some people don't like rules which limit how they behave towards others. Fine. But their behavior is not always welcomed by others in the community, and if the comm…

• RonW commented on The Hidden Power of Prototypes

  I agree that prototypes are a very useful tool. Try::ALRM is genuinely useful and interesting.

  I see the main limitation on prototypes being that & only coerces on the first parameter. I don't see a downside to & coercion on subsequent parameters. If the prototype says it should be a code ref, then if it looks like a block, treat it like a block, same as if the "sub" were there.

  I don't see much advantage to Dispatch::Fu. While it adds a little syntactic sugar, it's really just an indirect way to do:

  if ($cgi->param("action") eq q{foo} and $cgi->param("userid") !=…