Phoenix.pm: Early perl humor

[intertwingled]

beer is food.

At 08:30 AM 9/3/02 -0700, you wrote:
>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
>> 
>> 
>
>
>

--
even the safest course is fraught with peril