It’s not that Perl programmers are idiots, it’s that the language rewards idiotic behavior in a way that no other language or tool has ever done.
If you are concerned about netiquette, you are either concerned about your own and follow good netiquette, or you are concerned about others and violate good netiquette by bothering people with your concern, as the only netiquette you can actually affect is your own.
Life is hard, and then you die.
The Web provided me with a much needed realization that information cannot be fully separated from its presentation, and showed me something I knew without verbalizing explicitly, that the presentation form we choose communicates real information.
If Perl is the solution, you’re solving the wrong problem.
I guess there are some things that are so gross you just have to forget, or it’ll destroy something within you. Perl is the first such thing I have known.
Sometimes, the only way to learn something really well is to revert to the state of mind of a novice and reawaken to the raw observations that you have accumulated instead of relying on the conclusions you have reached from the exogenous premises absorbed through teaching and bookish learning.
A word says more than a thousand images. Exercises for the visually inclined: illustrate “appreciation”, “humor”, “software”, “education”, “inalienable rights”, “elegance”, “fact”.
The ultimate laziness is not using Perl. That saves you so much work you wouldn’t believe it if you had never tried it.
Unfortunately, nigh the whole world is now duped into thinking that silly fill-in forms on web pages is the way to do user interfaces.
I have argued that a religion or a philosophy cannot speak about facts of the world – if it does, it is now or will eventually be wrong – but it can and should speak about the relevance and ranking of facts and observations.
Gotos aren’t damnable to begin with. If you aren’t smart enough to distinguish what’s bad about some gotos from all gotos, goto hell.
Ignoring for a moment the power of the American Medical Association, we still wouldn’t see a huge amount of books on neurosurgery for dummies in 21 days or whatever. It’s just plain inappropriate, and it’s intentionally out of people’s reach.
Part of any serious QA is removing Perl code the same way you go over a dilapidated building you inherit to remove chewing gum and duct tape and fix whatever was kept together for real.