Yep, that's usually the case.

You are right, of course, and as I used the word "translated", that could imply a rewrite. I should have used "transliterated", as I kept the original structure.
I tried to find these scripts so I could give a concrete example, but I could only find my Python versions. But it was stuff in Perl like

open($file, "file.txt");
my $data = do { local $/; <$file> };

that in Python becomes

data = open("file.txt").read()

that makes you think, wtf Perl??? Really, why do you need all that crap just to read the whole file?

Thanks for your comment, it expresses my view pretty well. I want to add a note about this:

I started coding with BASIC and Z80 Assembly in the late 80's, then coded mostly C until 97 when I switched to C++, then finally in 2006 I switched to Python as main programming language. In these ~30 years I obviously had to program in several other languages, and Perl is by far the one I most hated. After my bad experience with Perl I even translated some Perl scripts coded by a biologist friend (Perl seems to be strong in the field) to show her how much more clear and concise they can be made in Python, and the difference is undeniable.

So it seems to me that Python (with occasional C extensions for speed) is a suitable "last language", though what the future holds no one knows. Except that it will be neither Perl 5 nor 6.

P.S.: JavaScript as it was in the beginning was pretty terrible too, even if it had a saner syntax. But it redeemed itself in the latest ES standards, and with the recent frameworks it is actually quite enjoyable.

It's even more interesting when you contrast it with the way the media conflate copyright infringement with stealing. When someone makes a bootleg copy of a movie, the original is still accessible. When someone steals something from you, you lose access to what has been stolen.

So, when will we read the news "Microsoft will steal workout videos from consumers"?

Indeed, Microsoft has been sloppy, as always. But don't worry, next time there will be no evidence of spying being done.

The FBI is only one of the cogs. Isn't it troubling when you can read either as ...

or

because the FISA Court allows for exactly that, a secret and unaccountable government. Some day they'll swap "Foreign" for "Federal" in that acronym and nobody will notice any difference.

The intersection you want is empty, unfortunately. Unless you consider Jainism conventional. Religions in general have a tendency to consider moral the killing of people with certain (arbitrary) characteristics. IMHO, if you believe that you're as immoral as you could be.

That would actually be the AGPLv3.

Yes, MS loves UNIX standards. Like when they decided to use \ as folder delimiter, just to be different. And instead of using about any-fucking-thing else, they had to pick exactly the escape character. The Devil himself was envious of their ingenuity, which was eclipsed only many years later, with the launch of IE6.

The article's author lives in the Sahara, 30*C is already too cold!

(it should be a degree glyph instead of an asterisk, but /. thinks unicode is bad)

Really? I mean, are you guys so fucking retarded that you're not able to setup your own .deb repositories? Fuck, you can even use Launchpad's PPAs!

And it seems it's inconsequential to them as well. And from that we can extrapolate and say that those users, that were willing to pay but now are probably going to get the content by illegal means, doesn't really matter. It's a win-win-win scenario!

It doesn't justify the cost... you only need to test the cable once, when you're buying it. If your work involves dealing with lots of cables, then buy a tester.

My thoughts exactly. What we actually need is cheap hardware testers, available at any store so the consumer can test the cables before bringing them home. Online stores could state more confidently their cables were actually tested too.

Me too. And I guess any programmer feels the same, as we're trained to express what we're thinking without errors (as doing otherwise makes the compiler/tests scream at us).

A hyperbolic analogy may help you understand the reaction: imagine you know a guy that for three decades has been raping children with impunity, and now he starts giving away lots of candy... would you trust him?