"Programmers in Love"

davorg on 2004-02-17T08:01:19

My Google news alert brought me this link this morning. It's a story from IT News in Australia about the Valentines Day Haiku competition.

It's nice that they made the effort, but they should really have done some fact checking. For example:

...they composed their praise in haiku -- since Perl itself sometimes returns error messages in haiku.

(Yes, I'm aware of Coy.pm but I think the text implies that Perl sometimes just emits haiku at random).

I particularly liked:

...outmoded expressions, such as "less" and "strict," that wouldn't be used by Perl programmers today

And that's followed immediately by this explaination of "less":

the Perl compiler recognises "less" as a command to use less of something, such as memory

Which, of course, is what "less" will do - just as soon as someone gets round to implementing it.

Finally, given that the audience for something called "IT News" might be assumed to be reasonably computer literate, I'm surprised that they felt the need to explain what a shell is:

The shell prohibits users from meddling with the operating system's functions without first submitting commands.

Which is accurate if slightly confused (and confusing).