http://greenokapi.net/blog Perl, Haskell, stuff Thu, 25 Sep 2008 05:27:46 +0000 http://backend.userland.com/rss092 en I've never studied Python, but I'd quite like to at some point in the future. It seems very much like Perl with a different set of design criteria. Yeah, there are differences, but compare with C, Lisp, COBOL, and you can see why Perl and Python are clustered together in the "P ... http://greenokapi.net/blog/2008/09/25/some-thoughts-on-python/ I went to my 3rd Italian Perl Workshop, IPW2008 at the end of last week. It seems to have been the most successful Italian conference to date, and it certainly succeeded at being both a national workshop and an international event. It hadn't occurred to me before that these are ... http://greenokapi.net/blog/2008/09/24/italian-perl-workshop-2008/ One of the questions in a recent survey on rec.arts.int-fiction asked if we preferred "story" or "puzzle" interactive fiction. Though it's not as much of a binary choice as the wording implied, there are two extremes of a continuum, and many people have a preference towards one end or the other. I'm not a ... http://greenokapi.net/blog/2008/09/13/two-cultures-of-interactive-fiction/ (Cross posted from my use.perl blog) The Italian Perlmongers are finalising their preparations for IPW 2008, Pisa. I managed to get to the last 2 while I was working in Florence, and the organizers have always managed to get a great venue, coffee breaks with unusually nice biscuits, and put ... http://greenokapi.net/blog/2008/08/01/italian-perl-workshop-2008-looking-tempting/ I recently posted some things to Perl's CPAN that I've previously discussed in this blog. After my post on AUTOLOAD hate, I released the module discussed in it as Sub::Auto. I finally released Attribute::Cached briefly discussed in my Readable Perl slides). Already mentioned Sub::Curried today. http://greenokapi.net/blog/2008/07/27/cpan-updates/ Debolaz asked in #moose about the best way to create: a list of numbers like 10,25,50,100,250,500,1000,etc without tracking any other state than the number itself Nope, this isn't A020179 but the much more prosaic A112024. Debolaz wanted this sequence, or something similar to it, for the same reason the US used it for currency - the numbers are ... http://greenokapi.net/blog/2008/07/27/102550-sequence-fun/ A couple of interesting comments to my Five things I hate about Perl. Quicksilver pointed out that I'd missed the difference between arrays and lists. Yup, that's pretty subtle, and of course it's bitten me a few times (though oddly enough, I don't have that strong a dislike of it). Luqui on ... http://greenokapi.net/blog/2008/07/03/more-perl-hate-and-what-to-do-about-it-autoload/ I've enjoyed using Vox.com over the last couple of months but I'm finally taking the plunge and moving the blog here to greenokapi.net/blog. Though I've occasionally wanted more flexibility, the trade-off with a hosted service is that you waste no time tinkering, the only thing you can do is write. ... http://greenokapi.net/blog/2008/07/01/hello-world/ Enough advocacy, let's get to the nitty gritty of 5 things I hate about Perl. (After brian d foy.) The difference between list and scalar context is subtle. One bug that bites people too often is this (for some value of "people", including me, far too often): sub myfunc { return } ... http://greenokapi.net/blog/2008/06/23/five-things-i-hate-about-perl/ The Countdown code I showed you isn't really taking advantage of Haskell's laziness. We should only have to check entries up until the point that we have enough matches (in the current code 'take 4 $ getAnagrams') and that's good. However, we have to generate the whole powerset first, so that we ... http://greenokapi.net/blog/2008/06/20/more-countdown-laziness-scheme-and-german-frogs/