Read David Healy's Pharmageddon.

Jennicam!

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...

My credit card is Chip and PIN preferred and it was wonderful using it in Europe last week.

Unfortunately, it was issued by Diners Club (a Mastercard) and they stopped accepting applications.

Strange, I could have sworn that I replied to this with a very detailed and lengthy response... urg.

Anyway, upshot is this: Perl 6 hasn't yet had a chance to flop. It was released in beta in December of last year and continues to make steady progress. Users are checking it out slowly, but I don't expect a landslide migration. P6 will have to prove itself as a language.

I won't say, "I don't think it has," because it demonstrably has not.

The language has been released in open beta. It still has many properties that I think chase away those who approach it outside of language research communities. As a Perl 5 nostalgia fix, the learning curve is just too daunting, so as the beta progresses, I expect it to continue to build its own base of enthusiasts, the same way Perl did when it was first released.

So the language has not "flopped" yet because it hasn't had a chance to succeed yet.

It took Perl many years to go from a small toy that a trivial number of Usenet enthusiasts had heard of to a standard part of the Unix and Unix-like toolset. I don't think Perl 6 will gain traction any faster, especially given the learning curve. That's not flopping.

However, it has some substantial advantages over other languages. High on that list is the trivial nature of slinging highly functional grammars as first-class objects. That's something that you just can't do as easily in any other language that I know of. Perl 5 parsers and those of many other high level languages have some pretty severe performance penalties; yacc and its kin aren't dynamic enough; the various parser generators for Java are fast and mostly complete, but really painful to use.

Basically, you need a language that closely integrates grammars with the language itself in order gain the benefits of Perl 6. Here's and example parser I posted to reddit the other day:

https://www.reddit.com/r/perl6...

A few other notable things that I think will draw people in:

The generalization of operators over iterable sequences and the hyper-operator version of reduction are features that you're going to hear a lot more about, I suspect. Perhaps in Perl 6, perhaps in other languages that adopt these ideas. I'm especially stunned by the utility of hyper-method-invocation (foo>>.method) which dispatches a given method over any iterable sequence of objects (whether they are the same type or not).

Full macros have not yet landed, not least because we've never had a full understanding of what macros would be. We know that they need to operate on the ASTs that represent code, and all of the self-hosting properties necessary to support that are there, but the exact syntax and semantics that are most Perl-friendly haven't fully gelled, yet. Once they do, I think that every language to have true macros in the past (mostly Lisp variants) has demonstrated the power of this tool.

A few other languages auto-generate accessors for classes, but I find the way Perl 6 does it to be a substantial improvement on the field, and it really is a joy to use. I think others will feel the same.

Speaking of objects, role composition will take some time for people to get used to, but as in other languages that have had similar features, I think this will be critical to Perl 6's adoption.

There are dozens of smaller features that are just quality-of-life benefits ranging from lexical variable/named parameter passing to the way any block can be turned into an anonymous closure and even curried. Some of these will be important to some, but not to others. It will be interesting to see it play out.

Waze has methods of dealing with this. It's called a private installation...

https://wiki.waze.com/wiki/Pri...

But we don't just go putting them anywhere arbitrarily. We rely on local governments and DOTs to tell us where to put them. How? By determining if it's a private road or if there are regulatory signs prohibiting through traffic.

So if the homeowners don't want traffic routed through their neighborhood they need to go to their local government and get that done. Then soon as that's legally accomplished, then us editors for Waze will take the steps to prevent through routing through the neighborhood.

The cities need to sue Waze.

No. The city needs to put up a sign that says no through traffic and us Waze editors will make it a private installation. https://wiki.waze.com/wiki/Pri...

I have SA for server licenses. It's ridiculous for desktops -- especially when businesses rarely upgrade their desktop OS and more often than not want to downgrade the OEM license that comes with a box.

Meanwhile many companies don't get that option. I managed a few small companies ... like 10-20 computers each. I took the OEM version of Windows 7 Pro and replaced it with a standard install using a volume license key that each company purchased to make management easier. Well unless you have Software Advantage, they can't upgrade to Windows 10 without paying. That's ridiculous. They paid for Windows 7 with purchase of new PC. If I hadn't wiped it and replaced it with a vol license install, they could upgrade to 10 for free. But no.... So you have to pay for Windows once, then again for the volume license install, then again to go to 10.

It's the free market at work. If these jobs keep paying better and better, more and more people will get the training to go into the field and balance it out. But that's not happening because...

I teach computer information science at a college. We have a hard time recruiting students into the program because they pretty much all say they don't want to spend years learning how to be a programmer when all of the jobs are being replaced by foreigners or outsourced overseas.

Way back in the early 90s when we first got a Unix box at work, one of the admins felt that all the programs in /bin should really be owned by bin so he did a chown bin /bin/* /usr/bin/*

Apple's non-iPhone revenue is comparable to Microsoft's *total* revenue.

As a guy who bought a 128K Mac in 1984 and has been with them all this time (except for a brief period in late 90s) I would have never dreamed a statement like that would someday be true (and oh do I wish I had, and bought the stock!)

So if isn't registered, would it become unavailable for someone else to grab? Most other one letter com, orgs, and nets are reserved. Only a few are grandfathered in, like x.org.

Last Summer we had our cousin and her two kids stay with us for a week. The boy at some point asked my wife to buy him something on his Android phone for $5, so she plugged in her payment info. He apparently saved it or she saved it accidentally. Two weeks later she noticed numerous $49.99 charges to Google Play totaling just shy of $2,000.