[oak perl] Introduction

Edwin s edwincime at yahoo.com
Sat Jun 14 12:21:57 CDT 2003


Hello Everyone,
I have been involved in the IT field since 1981.  I have seen many 
changes in the field as I am sure many of you have.
 
My interests are in learning perl and about the environment in
which it works the best, unix or linux.  I've heard it said
you use perl to get things done.
 
I have a site, if you can take a look and comment, I'd appreciate it.
 
login:webuser, no password
http://69.3.90.141/cgi-bin/lottery.cgi
 
 
 
Regards,
Edwin
 
--------------- Ignore the rest, I'm just venting ---------------
I have been involved in the IT field since 1981.  I have seen many 
changes in the field as I am sure many of you have.
 
What are these cycles?  What are the constants?
Seems like Knuth's or someone like him, Niklaus Wirth, 
data structures will always be.
 
Unix? Linux? Shell command, regular expressions.. I remember c shell
and vi were used in universites in the 1980's.  It's still around
Object Oriented Languages?  Design patterns by the GOF came out in
1994 and it's still relevant today.
 
Management has no brains, (this will always be true, 5000BC or 5000AD)
This is cyclical.
 
 
What am I leading to?  Good question, no one knows the future,
but before I move to India or China (or at least alot of IT 
jobs go there) what will remain?  What will keep me employed
in the next 20 years without being caught up in the latest fad
everytime.  Next fad, let's outsource executive jobs overseas.
If programming jobs go overseas, why not management too, I
think you need local people to watch over those programmers!!!
(Executives ---- Do they not think??? )
 
Which leads me back to perl (regular expressions) and linux (unix
has withstood the test of time!).  So my interests are: object
oriented perl using design patterns and data structures.

Let's take one example.  MVC (Model View Controller), separate
the model from the view and the controller.  
So you have java servlets (mixes view(html) and business logic) 
which led to java server pages (does a better job of separating
view from logic (but still not good enough) which led to
JSP struts (a wonderfully complex architectural piece of 
work)
 
So now you have php (mixes html with scripts), view and logic 
all in the same page?  Let's create templates to separate out 
the html from the php.  I'm still new to php but I think the 
next evolution is php struts ( just to over architect php like 
they did with jsp ).
 
"Seems like deja vu all over again"
 
Which leads me back to perl and something interesting Larry
Wall said in discussing object oriented perl, paraphrasing, 
"we're not going to create rules (like other languages) to
keep people from looking at, modifying object instance variables,
common sense should keep you out.  If you don't belong there,
just stay out of there".
 
"What we don't trust one another?"
 
Which leads me back to perl and one of the things that drive
people mad (including me), there is often not a single way
to do things.  That's fine with me, I can accept that
because the contrary thought ultimately leads to a worse evil 
like JSP struts which forces people into MVC when using java 
servlets correctly you can do MVC quite nicely.
 
 
which leads me back to perl, I believe perl trusts people
to fuck up or not fuck up, it's entirely up to them.
That's why I can accept the perl culture.
 
Regards,
Edwin
 

 
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