Emacs

What!? And then Dice misses all those comments ;-)

"When referring to the language, the name is normally capitalized (Perl) as a proper noun. When referring to the interpreter program itself, the name is often uncapitalized (perl) because most Unix-like file systems are case-sensitive. Before the release of the first edition of Programming Perl, it was common to refer to the language as perl; Randal L. Schwartz, however, capitalized the language's name in the book to make it stand out better when typeset. This case distinction was subsequently documented as canonical."

Source: Wikipedia

Nitpick: it's, not its ;-)

So, what's the difference between it's and it's?

A hackintosh is maybe nice for a hobby but I use my computer to make money so I rather buy the real think instead of having to wonder if I have to start my day with tweaking my computer before I can get work done. It's also one reason why I currently run Linux in Parallels (and not VirtualBox).

Oh, wow. And people actually moderate this clueless drivel up?

ignorance is bliss

http://www.jwz.org/blog/2014/0...

Is that they don't become obsolete as fast? My mother still uses a iPad 2. I sold my iPad 4th generation to my wife's cousin, and she and I now both have an iPad Air 2. And to be honest, I just sold mine because I could, not because I needed to upgrade to the Air 2. I think the iPad 4th gen I sold will be OK for at least 2 more years. And it wouldn't surprise me if it will get an iOS 9 update. Moreover, it wouldn't surprise me if it will get an iOS 10 update as well.

Or maybe he knows exactly what he does; how does the exported HTML compare to handcoded HTML?

Yup. Before Python Pascal was thought of as the language that was extremely readable; it was nearly like programming in pseudo code (hah, it was actually that a cleaner version of Pascal was used in several textbooks on algorithms). However, years ago when I had to port Pascal to Perl (no, I am not making this up) I came upon hundreds of lines of very hard to read code. After some careful study I discovered that someone had coded bubble sort (in a very weird, long winded way) with a separate piece of code to reverse the sort order. Basically sort { $b cmp $a } @items ...

My point is that how readable code is has also a lot to do if the implementation of an algorithm follows the expectations of the person reading the code. And (also) in Python there are many ways (really) to solve the same problem, including very unreadable ways.

I do agree that Perl has a lot of "line noise" like $, @, %, etc. but that's not that different from learning a language with a non-Latin alphabet (e.g. Hindi, which uses Devanagari). After a very short while (in my experience) those weird symbols become second nature and actually help with reading (they are there for a reason). It's even more fun when one of the major complains about Python is lack of some line noise; the use of significant white space instead of {} ...

Finally, while I have been doing some Python programming I am not attracted to the language. I don't know why I am attracted to Perl (and no, it's not because I am brainwashed by Perl). I think it's for the same reason that I consider Devanagari a very nice script. And why I am currently learning Haskell ;-)

Here's some Python: http://codepad.org/UzSmoxF2

Perl has OO for longer than 7-8 years. Perl is not harder to read/write than Python. Hard to read code can be written in any language, including Python. And yes, one can argue that Perl makes it easier to write hard to read code, but why would one do this? Last but not least a lot of hard to read Perl is the result of cargo cult coding; too many people back in the mid-90's thought: "Oh, I know this, it's just another programming language". Heh.

alcogrythem

I like it, sounds like a good title for a steampunk book: "The Alcogrythem" by Neal Stephenson.

Yeah, walled garden, right. You are aware that OS X is just *BSD under the hood, right? Moreover, one can run Parallels on top of OS X. I am currently typing this in a full screen Ubuntu 14.10 session in Parallels on a Mac mini. My first impression of this little beast: why didn't I buy one years sooner. It's silent. It just works, out of the box. And so far it runs Ubuntu fantastic! And with one four finger swipe I am in the OS X desktop.

Apple out of business within 5 years? Right, that's about the same time we finally have Linux on the desktop, right?