Phoenix.pm: Early perl humor

[Scott Walters]

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