Phoenix.pm: Early perl humor

[Eden Li]

This is all fine and dandy, but what language you use really depends
on the application you're working on.  One size fits all languages
rarely stay around very long (i.e. the ones that encompass all the
programming language models).  In some cases it makes sense
to use an imperative language like C or Java; in others it makes
more sense to use a logical language like Prolog.  Don't get me
wrong, I love programming in functional programming languages;
I just get kinda worked up when people (*ahem* Haskell
developers) use merits of functional programming on the whole
to promote their one functional language out of a class of many.

I hope I'm making sense; I tend to skip important steps in logic
when I've just had my coffee.  Alrighty, I think I'm done here.

eden

----- Original Message ----- 
From: "Scott Walters" <phaedrus at illogics.org>
To: <phoenix-pm-list at happyfunball.pm.org>
Sent: Tuesday, September 03, 2002 4:34 AM
Subject: Phoenix.pm: Early perl humor


> 
> 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
> 
>