What a pain. I musta stepped through the debugger I don't know how many times trying to trace bizarre error messages in "$!".
Ben Goldberg was kind enough to give me a few tips. I'll try them out tomorrow. His code was both clever and obfuscated. I must be reaching the next level of Perldom, because I understood it.
He's a bright guy, but I'll take readability over cleverness any day. I don't have the burning desire to use map, hash slices and one-liners that many in the Perl community seem to have. Ah, well. It's all about preference.
He did get on my case a bit about manually closing a socket that would have gone out of scope anyway. Sorry, but I'm too paranoid. Besides, I think it makes the program more readable and its simply more polite.
Oh - I upset someone by mocking Lisp today (you know, the whole parenthesis thing). First, he corrected my Lisp syntax (which, btw, I don't know at all and was clearly not meant to be syntactically correct anyway) and then his words were something like, "By the way, your joke was not funny". I wasn't even in a Lisp newsgroup.
Considering the shit I deal with every day that has nothing to do with programming, this remark just made me wanna snap my fucking keyboard in half and ram my fucking fist down this little pussy's fucking throat. Jesus fucking Christ, if that's the worst of your worries, why don't you come over so I can KICK YOUR CRYBABY ASS and give you something real to complain about! Boo fucking hoo. Someone made fun of your stupid ass programming language - SO FUCKING WHAT?
Anyway, I had to vent, and I didn't wanna get booted off the newsgroups or kill-filed by everyone, so I did it here.
Have a nice day.
