amerika_blog

Perl is the ultimate hacker's language.

It was for the 90s and 00s what Microsoft BASIC was to the 1980s.

However, I think it's also coming back. Most of the "inefficiencies" it got tagged with were relics of the server model at the time, like CGI.

Now many are seeing that mastery of a general-purpose language is better than knowledge of specialized methods in a specialized language.

The first is flexible; the latter is not.

The Perl culture is very much "Wild West" meets the race to space.

It's a language for people who are comfortable enough around theory that they don't need syntax to force them to use it.

At the same time, it's highly evolutionary -- it supports the fastest, dirtiest, hackinest method of getting to the goal -- and thus has prototyping built in to production.

I often write Perl scripts twice. The first is a tape-up job to "git 'er done" and the second is a more elegant and architected approached.

This method matches the configuration of most jobs. The client doesn't (fully) know what they want. Last-minute, world-bending exceptions arise. Well-intentioned schemes gang aft agley.

With this prototyping-production, I'm able to get something up and working, and can fix it later if the client has foresight.

Theory is great. I am the first to defend theory. But if it doesn't correspond to application, there's another word for it: arbitrary.

(You may note the difference between two predominant value systems illustrated in that sentence.)

Still the best all-purpose language. Trend languages like Ruby and Haskell are flashes in the pan.

"We are not inherently better than those people, we're just luckier about our surroundings."

It seems to me people choose their own actions. When enough choose badly, the society as a whole decays.

I support the NSA monitoring.

No, not a troll.

At this point, the USA has a ton of enemies. Filtering through emails, phone, etc. is a good way to catch these. We need to give law enforcement the tools it needs.

Seeing how this access was abused to hunt down Tea Party groups convinces me that the NSA needs to be de-politicized, not shut down.

I think we'll find that this monitoring is inevitable because the technology is there and also, since the technology is there, if it is not used and a terrorist incident occurs, people will be held responsible for NOT using it.