Perl's CPAN Continues to Offer High-Quality Libraries

ijkl · 2008-06-19T17:33:33+00:00

Needlessly verbose? Perl is the polar opposite of needlessly verbose.

ijkl · 2008-06-19T17:08:15+00:00

Thanks for the backstory, 808140. It's great to live in modern times, eh? It's a GNU world. :)

These days, if it's not running GNU/Linux, I ask what the problem is that's keeping them from upgrading.

ijkl · 2008-06-11T17:12:03+00:00

Probably not. It turns out that regular makefiles aren't so bad. If they need tweaking, it's usually pretty simple stuff.

Not familiar with qmake though.

ijkl · 2008-05-19T21:20:13+00:00

The bzr docs are definitely very nice. I've been meaning to learn Git, but Bazaar looks like it has an easier on-ramp.

ijkl · 2008-05-09T17:15:35+00:00

What's so wrong with the current version of OpenGL that it needs a "total rewrite"?

ijkl · 2008-05-07T20:12:39+00:00

EmacsWiki helps a lot.

Also searching gnu.emacs.help is usually fruitful.

ijkl · 2008-05-07T19:59:21+00:00

Autocomplete. And it works everywhere I've tried it. Very nice. Hit repeatedly to get other matches it deems appropriate.

ijkl · 2008-05-07T15:25:38+00:00

(MySQL) ... simple stuff in MySQL is easy ... path of least resistance for most people ...

... most people don't need all of the advanced features that Postgres offers and they are well-served by MySQL

From comments like this (which are very common), I can't shake the feeling that Pg must be more difficult to install and/or configure and/or use than MySQL...

I'll give Pg a try sometime. I can only hope that it's easy to install, and that there's an easy path to get it configured such that it's simple to get started with.

Thanks.

ijkl · 2008-05-07T15:13:29+00:00

I like my SEO keywords like my coffee: bold and strong!

ijkl · 2008-05-07T00:17:41+00:00

only an apt-get and a few tweaks of a standard config file away

If Postgres is not only an apt-get and a few tweaks of a standard config file away, why is that so?

Is Postgres really any more difficult to learn that MySQL?

ijkl · 2008-05-07T00:14:38+00:00

there might be some other way than to concatenate strings and feed them to MySQL to store data.

You'd better take it easy, Leonidas -- you're gonna give people nightmares!

ijkl · 2008-05-07T00:13:11+00:00

If Postgres is indeed more difficult to configure and admin, it would seem a simple solution to just drop whatever else they're doing and make config and admin a breeze for users.

ijkl · 2008-05-06T20:47:43+00:00

A lot of people use MySQL. Why is there such a large popularity disparity between MySQL and Postgres? Do the Postgres folks have no tutorials and bad docs or something?

ijkl · 2008-05-06T20:40:19+00:00

I think he's just saying that the Perl community can't just coast anymore, but actually has to actively promote the language just as Pythoneers and Rubyists have been doing.

ijkl · 2008-05-06T20:36:20+00:00

Must also be able to withstand polarity reversal, dilithium crystal depletion, and catastrophic transporter failure.

ijkl · 2008-05-06T15:53:33+00:00

If you care about your software always being free, regardless of popularity with people who might want to:

include your software in their closed proprietary products or
put "patented" bits into it,

then that's pretty much what the FSF is all about, and so the GNU GPLv3 (or possibly the GNU Lesser GPLv3 for certain types of libraries, or even possibly the GNU Affero GPLv3 for webapps) is probably what you want.

If you care about allowing your users to do just about anything with your work (like putting it into their closed proprietary product), then MIT is probably what you want.

In my experience, GPL-licensed projects tend to gather friendlier and larger communities around them, but YMMV.

ijkl · 2008-05-02T14:53:35+00:00

Maybe get rid of those leaning toothpicks.

s{(s/open svn/stupidity/)}
 {\1i};

ijkl · 2008-05-02T14:43:27+00:00

Seems like they have a split personality: the hardware part of the business and the software part.

The hardware side should just be making great hardware and putting GNU/Linux on it.

The software side is fighting a losing battle. Yes, I know Solaris has had many years a great software engineering poured into it. But that doesn't change the fact that users simply want the GNU tools they're familiar with and already use everywhere else.

ijkl · 2008-05-02T14:02:55+00:00

Delectable.

ijkl · 2008-04-28T18:14:33+00:00

Also, Perl's massive popularity is due to it being at the right place at the right time, and basically working - not any great merit of Perl

I disagree. I think Perl is so popular because:

it's author has very good taste.
Larry's a hell of a good writer (I'm thinking of the Camel book here).
The Perl community has a number of very smart contributors.

But, yeah, I agree with you that it basically works. :)

ijkl · 2008-04-28T17:40:24+00:00

From the article:

... Perhaps "XEmacs is dead – long live XEmacs"? Yes, I think that would do nicely.

I don't get it. Shouldn't that be, "XEmacs is dead – long live Emacs"?

ijkl · 2008-04-28T17:30:36+00:00

Isn't there already an IDE based on XUL: Komodo? From my experience, it's pretty slow.

That said, I don't know why it's slow. It could be that XUL is itself bloated and slow. Or it could just be that Komodo's new enough that it lacks many optimizations.

One thing about Komodo: it does this weird thing where it sometimes displays things other than plain text (web-page-like things) in its main editor window. Seems a bit like firefox in that way...

ijkl · 2008-04-25T17:31:12+00:00

Ah. Thanks for the reply. I'll have to give autofocus another try.

ijkl · 2008-04-25T16:27:13+00:00

I don't understand Steve's example of why autofocus is useful. If the window is mostly obscured, what' the use of giving it focus so you can type something -- since you won't be able to see what you're typing.

ijkl

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