The Mighty Buzzard

• About: Grouchy old Perl coder.

Recent Actions

• Commented on Why does this not work
  Yep, like brian said. You access hash elements with $hash{"$key"}, $hash("$key") is you trying to access a referenced sub. Also, go ahead and use "my %fn;" at the top so you know how your variable is scoped, what kind it...
• Commented on Is Perl a write only language?
  Appears that way now, yep....
• Commented on Is Perl a write only language?
  Read again, that is not what I said....
• Commented on Is Perl a write only language?
  Sorry, missed a bit. I learned it on the fly from other people's code, the documentation on the systems, and asking coworkers like a whole lot of us did back in the day. I've never taken a class or read...
• Commented on Is Perl a write only language?
  Perl 3 back in 90 professionally, though it wasn't by any means the entire job description. My first paying job that didn't include anything except Perl coding was a billing system for a MMO back in 97. Perl 4, in...
• Commented on Is Perl a write only language?
  I've been writing it professionally longer than he's been an author. 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...
• Commented on Is Perl a write only language?
  You realize you just said the same thing as me, yeah? If they didn't think it was hard to start with, there would be no need to give you money to show them otherwise. Which means you have a financial...
• Commented on Is Perl a write only language?
  That's nice. You earn your living by people thinking it's hard, so even if I cared that you were offended (I don't, that's your choice not my problem) I wouldn't lend an assertion that it is hard from you any...
• Commented on Is Perl a write only language?
  Perl isn't hard, the people teaching that it is are just incompetent. Those who can't do, teach. Maybe if we want our future generations of coders to be able to code worth a damn we should start having them taught...
• 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...
• 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...
• 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...
• Commented on No One Is Immune to Abuse
  No thanks. I'm not emotionally fragile and I flatly refuse to participate in an environment that creates or coddles emotionally fragile people. They're far worse to work with than the worst jerk I've ever met and even worse than them...
• Commented on Using Perl to prepare sequencing files to submit to NCBI's GEO
  No reason not to but I'd personally write this as a shell script. There's no text processing being done to speak of, so it would make more sense to me to write it as a much more legible bash script...
• Commented on Moving from Perl_5.8.8 (2007) TO Perl_5.36.0 (2022)
  You're better off dropping the -w and going with "use warnings;" . The command line switch will apply to every bit of code run in that interpreter rather than just yours. Plus, putting things you consider important on the command...

Comment Threads

• Jeremy Leader commented on Is Perl a write only language?

  I've been writing it professionally longer than he's been an author.

  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.

• 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”.
• 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.

• Eoin commented on Why does this not work

  Thank you both.
  Eoin

• 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)