Phoenix.pm: Early perl humor

[Doug Miles]

Scott Walters 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"

Cool! Can you do it by Thursday? :)

> 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
> 
>