Randal L. Schwartz

• Website: www.stonehenge.com/merlyn/
• About: print "Just another Perl hacker"; # the original!

Recent Actions

• Commented on Is Perl a write only language?
  You earn your living by people thinking it's hard I actually don't. I made a lot of money helping people figure out how easy Perl is. So I consider *that* statement of yours also disrespectful of the truth....
• Commented on Is Perl a write only language?
  Perl isn't hard, the people teaching that it is are just incompetent. Hey, that's a pretty broad brush you're painting with, and I take personal offense at that, and I'm sure many of my fellow instructors would be similarly offended....
• Posted A bit of history about The Gecko Book, aka "Learning Perl on Win32 Systems"... (from my "Half my life with Perl" talk a decade ago) to Randal L. Schwartz

  

  
  

• Commented on Perl Weekly Challenge 208: Minimum Index Sum and Duplicate and Missing
  Bing chat got a hole-in-one on both problems, with some head scratching way to solve the second one. All I gave it was the text literally as-is, plus the instruction "solve this in Perl". Wow. use strict; use warnings; sub...
• Commented on ChatGPT for Perl Learning
  Here's what bing chat (itself a cousin of ChatGPT) had to say about your opening paragraph, and I agree: Using ChatGPT to generate Perl code can be a useful strategy for some people. It can help generate decent Perl code...
• Commented on Please relicense from "Perl 5" to MIT or Apache 2.0 license
  I concede. Y'all have made good points. I withdraw any objection to the effort....
• Commented on Please relicense from "Perl 5" to MIT or Apache 2.0 license
  Artistic 2 has already had thorough legal review. Has something happened in copyright law to require a new review?...
• Commented on Please relicense from "Perl 5" to MIT or Apache 2.0 license
  Given that both Artistic 1 and Artistic 2 are clearly OSI-approved licenses, I don't see what the benefit is to relicense anything. Can someone explain this to me in simple terms?...
• Posted Perl is not dead to Randal L. Schwartz

  Came across an interesting video from one of the users of Perl: Is Perl dead? @Randal L. Schwartz on Dart and Flutter @Code Maven

• Posted "My half-life with Perl" from OSCON 2013 live encore performance to Randal L. Schwartz

  I've been asked by a couple of Perl groups to give a virtual presentation. Writing new material that would only have been shown once is a lot of work for a small reward.

  But, I just happened to be cleaning out my virtual junk drawer, and stumbled across my "half my life with Perl" slide d…

• Commented on Perl Podcasts
  I'm no longer running (or hosting) FLOSS Weekly. After 13 years, I decided to take those 6 hours per week back to work on other things. Also, you spelled my name wrong. :(...
• Commented on .9999% Pure Moose.
  Less than 1%? Maybe you meant 99.99%?...
• Commented on Don't use until, unless...
  Just really avoid "unless... else". That's... just.... wrong....
• Commented on C comments and regular expressions
  Your problem is the greediness of the .* here: qr!/\*.*\*\/!s Just use a lazy version: qr!/\*.*?\*\/!s...
• Commented on What is a "Senior Developer"?
  Are you able to move towards the goal at least in part by eliminating the risk that you might be wrong? If not, you have some learnin' to do....
• Commented on Highlights from TPC 2017
  For your polyglot section, there was also my lightning talk on monday about looking in to Dart: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cDMMF_b7Kbs...
• Commented on Something New Every Day
  Clever!...
• Commented on New to Perl? Come to The Perl Conference in Orlando for only $50.
  April 10th, 2016 12:01:00 AM EST Since EST won't exist until November, what are you actually intending?...
• Commented on On The Mojolicious Codebase
  The irony of forking things that are themselves forks of sane modules. Joy....
• Commented on ZipRecruiter is sponsoring the QA Hackathon
  And yes, I'm very happy that ZipRecruiter has paid a significant chunk of my bills for over two years....
• Posted chat2.pl just got real to Randal L. Schwartz

  20 years ago, I really wanted the chat2.pl domain name, to commemorate the one piece of code I ever contributed to the core. I even wrote the .pl administrators, and got no response.

  Well, guess what I have now! chat2.pl!

  Behold the wonder that is:…

• Commented on This just in: study shows advantages to RTFM
  I'm confused by your comment. What "test" did you add? An email address with a space after the @ is perfectly valid. The other system is broken. Is Email::Valid erroneously flagging that as invalid?...
• Posted Found a bug in File::Finder to Randal L. Schwartz

  I uploaded File::Finder to the CPAN more than a decade ago. I was using it for a project today, and found a bug that has been in there in the beginning. I forgot to localize $_ in ->contains, which clobbered File::Find's $_, used by just about everything else.

  I couldn't even remember wh…

• Commented on Which CPAN distributions include jquery.js ?
  Heh. chat2.pl...
• Commented on MetaCPAN Thanks Bytemark for Two Years as a Hosting Sponsor
  I'm still sad that search.cpan.org has more SEO than metacpan. I'd really like to just forget about search.cpan.org at this point....
• Commented on YAPC::BR 2015 - Sep 18-20
  I've got the dates free. If you want some more English content, I'd be happy to pop down there....
• Commented on Removing AUTOLOAD from CGI.pm
  I'm just happy that CGI.pm, which has made me a lot of money over the decades, is getting some attention. Yeay!...
• Commented on A note about X500::DN and X500::DN::Marpa
  It always seems amazing that people propose standards that require some intense amount of parsing just to get basic values. :)...
• Commented on The Silver Camel goes to ... Mark Keating
  Wait... silver camel? What are those? Tried googling, but that showed nothing....
• Posted git blame across the entire codebase to Randal L. Schwartz

  A few years ago, a script showed up on the git mailing list that would effectively run "git blame" across the entire tree, and aggregate the line counts by author. Here's the first 50 authors as of commit 86714aaae213175ea8c716ad22c1e10300d5bf61:

  Total lines: 2…

Comment Threads

• Aristotle commented on Is Perl a write only language?

  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.

  He is not in the world objecting to that. He objected to your original statement that “the people teaching [perl] are just incompetent”, which is a world of different from “teachers who tell their students perl is hard should not be teaching”.
• The Mighty Buzzard commented on Is Perl a write only language?

  Read again, that is not what I said.

• Aristotle commented on Is Perl a write only language?

  Oh, I see. I completely misread that, and probably so did Randal. Under that misreading, your first reply to Randal reads like a doubling down on that apparent position, when actually that response is just prioritizing overtly demonstrating disregard for people’s responses to you over figuring out why they responded that way – and with that, the scene is set for a waste of everybody’s time.

• The Mighty Buzzard commented on Is Perl a write only language?

  Appears that way now, yep.

• chrisarg commented on Is Perl a write only language?

  Python is the go-to language nowadays and I see lots of bad Python code just because too many people are coding in it (often with an LLM)