merlyn writes "If you haven't seen it, Usenet's history is now google-ized. And lo and behold, I found the post that I made that became the trigger for the Camel Book. Wow."
Now with parrot, this is almost true.(And, when are you going to rewrite the Configure script for Perl in Perl?:-)
(Gee, this usenet archive is going to become one of my Favorite Ways to Waste Time.)
"I've had trouble with the array/scalar notation, as well as not always being certain whether to use a $ or @ at all. I've always worked it out, but it's somehow not very intuitive. Has anyone else had this problem?"
--Tom Christiansen
http://groups.google.com/groups?selm=90400002%40su shi
Re:A perl beginner's problems...
gnat on 2001-12-11T20:32:58
Ha! That's hilarious! What's cool is that his other points were addressed, often in really neat ways ($!'s string/number duality, for instance). And he was reaching for the (A = B) =~/C/ idiom right from the start! I wish my first post had as much effect on the course of Perl. I got 0 followups to that one :-) --Nat
Re:A perl beginner's problems...
vsergu on 2001-12-11T21:14:10
How did you manage to find that? Google's Usenet searching is seriously broken for me at the moment. Following the link you gave works, but clicking on the search button on that page (for "group:comp.lang.perl.* author:nathan author:torkington") returns no results, and most other queries I tried (including all searches for myself) gave either no results or far fewer than they should have.
Anyone else having trouble?Re:A perl beginner's problems...
gnat on 2001-12-11T21:59:08
Go to groups.google.com and either search from their or use their Advanced Search (which lets you specify fields). It works--I just found embarrassingly old posts of mine:-) --Nat
Re:A perl beginner's problems...
vsergu on 2001-12-11T22:19:14
That's what I was doing. I use groups.google.com all the time, but it's not working right today. For example, I just did a plain search for "author:torkington" and found exactly 1 message, by Andy Torkington, posted this month in uk.adverts.computer. Nothing older.
But if no one else is having a problem, it must be something weird with me, though I can't imagine what.Re:A perl beginner's problems...
vsergu on 2001-12-11T23:22:18
Whatever the weirdness is, it's related to IE (naturally). Everything works fine with Netscape 4, so now I can join in the fun and embarrassment.
My oldest post is a report on a cold fusion seminar from 1989-04-28. Yikes! I don't know what I was using that caused it to have that ugly fake justification, but I shouldn't have been. Most of my other early posts seem to be about RuneQuest.
It seems I didn't say anything on Usenet about Perl until 1996-05-06, a year or so after I started programming in it. Then I was just pointing out a newbie's misunderstanding of localtime().
Re:A perl beginner's problems...
brev on 2001-12-12T01:06:56
Yeah, that post was notable for two things. It was far-seeing, as you already mentioned. And it demonstrates the usability dilemma of open source projects. Once you're expert enough to fix the problem, usually you no longer care, or feel emotionally invested in defending the design.
How about making the perl 6.0.0 announcement a reply to Tom's post?:)
I don't see any karaoke mentions, though.
