All the Perl that's Practical to Extract and Report

Fekh

TorgoX on 2002-03-02T08:28:24

Dear Log,

A wretched day: dingy weather, uncooperative car, a zoo-tour of idiocy on IRC, and the persistent feeling that there is just too much to do in Perl-land and altogether too many people that will have to be tied up with piano wire before any of it can actually be done. Nor could I manage to wrap up my chapter today; altho it's not yet 2am, so the day is still young! Moreover, a huge chunk of last week that I spent giving editorial comments on a manuscript has so far produced no response at all from the author. I guess that my pointing out his factual errors may have oppressed his muse.

I should look on the bright side, tho: I'm successfully rounding up some good reviewers for my book (in fact, more than I know what to do with), and as of today there is a chunk less of tchrist's useless bloviation in perlfaq.

The beheadings will continue until morale improves!

hmph

gnat on 2002-03-02T09:26:23

I think those were my useless bloviations, and I disagree that they were useless. We argued about this, Tom and I, when we rewrote the FAQ. I argued for just pointing to modules. He argued, convincingly, that that's not teaching people how to fish, that's just giving them a Fish McButtplugget.

"Read the file, write a temporary file reflecting your change, move temp file over original file" is a classic programming idiom, and any programmer worth his or her salt needs to know that. By all means point them to File::Tie, but don't rob them of the chance to acquire clue that will make them better programmers.

Whining ends.

--Nat

Re:hmph

jhi on 2002-03-02T18:30:40

The question is whether the purpose of a FAQ is to teach people to fish. I don't think it is. I think I can safely say that I'm a programming geek, and I still think just handing out Fish McButtpluggets is fine. Most people should never be sent out to the Beringian see in trawlers: it's the deadliest profession in the world.
 

Re:hmph

pudge on 2002-03-03T13:08:48

Agreed; the FAQ is primarily for use by people who are just going to use the easy answer anyway. They can purchase the Cookbook for a more in-depth response, or we can spinoff a larger FMTYEWTK series ...

Re:hmph

TorgoX on 2002-03-02T19:54:35

You wrote that? I'd swear that it was classic Tomic tone, especially here:
...those are operations of a text editor. Perl is not a text editor. Perl is a programming language. You have to decompose the problem into low-level calls to read, write, open, close, and seek.
Might as well just attach "NO, YOU'RE WRONG!!!" to the answer.

Re:hmph

jhi on 2002-03-04T16:04:50

We might as well throw away the regex engine and tell the users to dust off their discrete math book (and if they don't have one, they obviously are not worthy) and implement the state machine themselves, because what the hell is pattern matching doing in a "programming language".