Wild guess, but its probably because FF is built on the mozilla framework, which is used by at least several popular apps. For example I also use Mozilla Thunderbird and ActiveState Komodo every day.

There are vmware images of OSX in the wild and the XCode emulators are the best emulators I've ever seen. So you could pull it off... though if you're serious about it you do need a device.

But I'm not sure who all those people that are buying iOS devices are if you don't have one already.

When this happens, it is the civic responsibility of the person who feels underrepresented to get involved in politics and get constituents to vote for them.

If nobody votes for you, that is proof that your opinion is an extreme minority.

If you just sit on the couch and do nothing, you have no right to complain.

This is the way the U.S. government works.

Sure, you've got a point. You need it, or some foreign entity is going to be pounding on your door with a gun to your face telling you to bow to their flag.

But the current means to achieve the end in place now is rather absurd. The waste, abuse, and fraud is mind boggling.

> If the DoD budget was trimmed even by half (which is still too bloody much spending) and the monies redirected toward, infrastructure, education, health, technology research, etc.. Inside of a very few short years we'd be looking at realizing a Utopian society. I don't think anyone really understands just how bloody big their budget is relative to all other spending.

This is so true man. This is why I rarely comment on political discussion. Unless it is to talk about cutting defense spending, its pointless. Cut defense spending and... well... its pretty pointless pointing it out because no one seems to care.

It reminds me of burning the library in Alexandria a few millennia ago. What a waste of human effort.

Kind of so obvious the a MS only solution is going to have this that I didnt think it needed mentioned.

I was talking about between PHP, perl, ruby, and python that perl was the only language that can do this out of the box on any platform.

> Because this still works:

Sure. This is DWIW (Do What I Want). Why should the code to add a string and a number include a type conversion? You've used the + operator, so its obvious to everyone that you want to add. Why should the code have to be more verbose than that?

By your logic, this is better programming:

i = parseInt("25") + 10; # $i is 35

Thats better?

CPAN is overrated.

A customer came to me with an outlook express email database that needed parsed. 15 minutes later I had this stub working:

use Mail::Box::Dbx;
my $dbx = Mail::Box::Dbx->new(folder => 'c:/path/to/database.dbx');
foreach my $mid ( $dbx->messageIds ) {
my $message = $dbx->find($mid);
print $message->subject, "\n";
}

I looked around and no other language has anything like this.

Python and Ruby are slow as molasses compared to Perl. Automatic dereferencing is absurd. It makes you write lines of code when a simple memory lookup would do.

> Would anyone convert existing perl 5 scripts to perl 6?

Perl 6 isn't a replacement for Perl 5 in the sense that Perl 5 was for Perl 4.

I've got plenty of uses for p6, but I'm sure I'll continue to use p5 for the rest of my life.

> I would wager that 80%+ of perl coders are Unix/Linux sysadmins.

You'd probably lose. Its everywhere.

> Where are the great perl-based frameworks?

Catalyst is where its at. And if you need a one-off framework, CGI::Application is easy as pie.

Coupled with the CPAN, the ecology of other languages look pretty useless to me.

There are a lot of people using perl. I've been introduced to new several new industries lately, and perl lets me develop apps that would need a team of HPCs and millions of dollars to do. And the new projects and requests keep on queuing up.

To me the biggest reason people don't hear much about perl is because its proponents and users are too busy getting stuff done.

> you don't happen to think that making your life a pain in the ass as a developer is gee, i dunno, slightly less important than making SSL implementation a serious psychological wall for end users?

Nothing was said about it being a pain in the ass... its the cost. Are you really suggesting someone like me has to spend thousands more a year on certs that will never be used by an end user? And then to make that cert actually perform correctly on a web site, we have to buy additional IP addresses? There is already not enough to go around as-is.

Why this instead of SVK?

Exactly. Unit tests do not prove the absence of bugs. They prove the existence of bugs.

> I also feel that I am going to come out of school not having the expertise required in a single language to land a good job.

You HAVE to practice writing software on seperate/personal projects while in school.

It doesn't matter what they teach in a CS degree program, if you don't work on personal projects, you'll never be a great software developer.

In other words, what they teach in the program is irrelevant. A Bachelors degree in Computer Science does not give anyone expertise required to land a good job. the It is what you do outside of class that gives you the expertise required to land a good job.