That doesn't sound anything like a car. You must be new here.

Sounds like a typical Friday night for me.

Try looking at Perl code from 2009 instead.
You can say that Perl code from 2000 and Perl code written today are practically two different programming languages.

Differently from most other languages, Perl is an evolving language.

Just so you can get a clear example, compare the syntax of Perl code written using MooseX::Declare with whatever code you're dealing with:

    http://search.cpan.org/dist/MooseX-Declare/lib/MooseX/Declare.pm

I bet if it wasn't for the dollar signs in front of variable names, you wouldn't even recognize it as Perl.

So, yes, Perl code from the 2000 is mostly crappy. Look for the newer stuff.

I happen to be Uruguayan and currently live in Uruguay... and while I endorse the OLPC project in my country (Plan Ceibal), I'd say you're grossly exaggerating its results - we already had a very good literacy prior to it (as in, better than the US), and the XO itself might not even have been the cheapest option.

The assessment from the study cited in the article I linked to might exaggerate the results, but note that the reference was to computer literacy, not literacy -- there's a pretty big difference between the two. (And, incidentally, the US has pretty abysmal levels of functional literacy, so if you are using any meaningful measure of literacy to compare with, I wouldn't classify "better than the US" as necessarily "very good" when it comes to literacy.)

and the XO itself might not even have been the cheapest option.

The XO may not be the cheapest (or even, what is more important, cost effective) option, perhaps -- though "might not be" isn't the same as a credible basis for believing that its not -- but certainly, the existence of the XO has spurred lots of efforts by big players in the hardware and software industry whose place would be threatened by widespread adoption of another platform to compete directly with it, and those other companies are defending long-term profit interests that go well beyond the immediate market for the XO and similar devices. But those other choices wouldn't exist if it wasn't for the OLPC project.

And, whether its necessarily the best product or the best solution, its hard to call the XO's that have been delivered, and what they have enabled, not a real product or a real solution.

Though if the OLPC project had not existed, I doubt such a far-reaching and ambitious plan would have been implemented, so even if it was more PR than anything, it WAS important, in making the politician's minds open to the possibility (and it was a HUGE selling point for politicians of the current party in power at the recent elections which they won).

The page linked to is an ad laden (carefully selected related items, yeah right) mess that has this third or fourth hand.

True. The source is a badly written Bloomberg story which says the new battery has a capacity of "3.4 amperes per hour". I wrote to the reporter pointing out the meaninglessness of that number. The useful numbers for battery technologies are $/KwH and Kg/KwH, and they don't have those. The only useful piece of information in the story is that Panasonic will make a real announcement tomorrow.

Apple is going to release a new version of the iPhone in the summer? Wow, how surprising and unprecedented

So it has multiple inheritance, namespaces (ok it *finally* has those), compiler-guaranteed type safety (some don't like this feature, but you can't say it's the same thing that's for sure), and metaprogramming/templating? I'm pretty sure it has none of those, and its OO implementation is pretty terrible in general. PHP is great for making a quick web page or simple web app, but once you get into more complex projects the simple static traceability of C++, not to mention multiple inheritance and the like, start to pay off in huge ways. The speed, while still an advantage (even just in symbol table lookups), isn't near as much a factor as the development time is.