An article at O'Reilly talks about an upcoming presentation about a collaborative effort to breed electric sheep.
These electric sheep are bred using a screen-saver like application, just like SETI@home.
The electric sheep are fractal like images, but they do actually evolve from a rudimentary form of DNA.
So far, so good, but the real fun thing is that the server code is written in Perl!
On the electric sheep site, we can read the next comment:
"The server version 2.3 source code tarball contains 3900 lines of multi-threaded perl. The flame library, the expat XML parser, and the mjpegtools mpeg2 encoder must be installed separately."
... 3900 lines of multi-threaded Perl ...
WONDERFULL!
Johan
WONDERFULL!
Are you sure? I think it cheats to make sure it won't run under Acme::Inline::PERL:
# use strict; ??
It seems to be nice clean code, but it won't be strict clean. It's procedural, all in package main::, with HTML inlined within the code.
It doesn't use -T or warnings, but there are bugs in the former, and people make reasonable arguments about why the latter is not always the best plan in some code.
I agree that it's wonderful that they are using perl, but it's not wonderful perl. Good, but not wonderful.
Here ends the troll
Re:for some value of wonderful
johanvdb on 2003-12-23T19:11:35
Yeah... I looked at code and indeed we are not withnessing a landmark in Perl source code ...
So, let me rephrase the wonderfull thing a bit and keep at the 'nice' level.
Makes me wonder, though... why people keep on writing such code?
JohanRe:for some value of wonderful
jmm on 2004-01-26T14:42:55
The androids keep deaming it up...
