Phoenix.pm: Early perl humor

[intertwingled]

I need a beer.

At 04:34 AM 9/3/02 -0700, you wrote:
>
>I got this off of the gopher humor archive at the UofMn perhaps 7 or 8 years 
>back. It contains references to the 1992 presidential election.
>Its not perl specific, but if you'll notice, the maniac archetype has
>many references to perl.
>
>http://www.slowass.net/phaedrus/texts/Types_of_system_administrators.html
>
>Just finish a frenzied two coding, uh, frenzy, and I'm happy to report that
>I did complete the assignment and get my entry in. Barely. Yay me. 
>
>http://icfpcontest.cse.ogi.edu/task.html
>
>I think next year Phoenix PM should hole up in bunker with pizza and jolt
and 
>do a group effort. Ie, I'm never doing *that* again alone.
>
>I used an agent based approach, where multiple independent persistent
>routines prioritized requests. The task involved running a maze, and
>shuttling packages about, attempting to optimize the fetching and delivery
>of packages to the shortist route.
>
>I could turn it into a presentation on:
>
>1. breadth first recursion with map solving as a case study, using
>   map decomposition into "blocks" as optimization
>2. "intelligent" agents
>3. "functional programming"
>
>This *was* a functional programming contest. 
>
>Excerpts from Haskell's website (yes, thats Haskell, with an "H"):
>
>"Much of a software product's life is spent in specification, design and 
>maintenance, and not in programming."
>
>"Anyone who has used a spreadsheet has experience of functional
programming. In 
>a spreadsheet, one specifies the value of each cell in terms of the values
of 
>other cells. The focus is on what is to be computed, not how it should be 
>computed."
>
>"An interesting consequence of the spreadsheet's unspecified order of 
>re-calculation is that the notion of assignment is not very useful. After
all, 
>if you don't know exactly when an assignment will happen, you can't make
much 
>use of it! This contrasts strongly with programs in conventional languages
like 
>C, which consist essentially of a carefully-specified sequence of
assignments, 
>or Java, in which the ordering of method calls is crucial to the meaning
of a 
>program."
>
>They're going a bit red blowing their own horn there (but so am I), but it 
>embodies some interesting ideas, all of which translate just fine to perl as
>far as I can tell.
>
>Cheers,
>-scott
>
>
>

--
even the safest course is fraught with peril