it’s unix, not eunuchs

Unbeknown to me, some people have been asserting that Perl’s heyday has come and gone.  Sterling Hanenkamp and Kevin Marshall have posted a fair rebuttal over at perlbuzz.com.  I thought I’d tag on a bit to what Kevin and Sterling brought up.

Truly great languages do receive updates less frequently as they age.  That’s because such a large base of programmers have learned the earlier libraries and being the bright chaps they are, they requested more and more features.  Until at a certain point the product becomes so eminently usable that very little else needs to be added for most users.

Now there are going to be specific requirements for each project and that’s where the development comes in.  But god bless these bright chaps, because not only do many Perl programmers write this custom code, but they frequently check it back into CPAN as modules.

So other people who program similar projects with these precise requirements don’t have to reinvent the 7-spoke, 16″, lithium-greased, carbon steel wheel.  You see, Perl provided the wheel to everyone who worked with the base language.  But not everyone needs a 7-spoke, 16″, lithium-greased, carbon steel wheel.  Especially when they’re writing really secure code that has to be analyzed line by line for security risks.  Or if they want to write really small code that will work on a mobile phone or embedded code.

Why is this good for business?

Do you really want your programmers to have to re-learn their code-base every 5 years?  I knew lots of people who used to know how to do some Visual C++ and Visual Basic development back in the .com days.  Then along came Java.  In the midst of this came a lot of middleware that provided common libraries for programmers.  And then came .net.  Now, most Java developers don’t do Microsoft stuff, but these days some .net guys do perl and some java guys do some .net.

But trying to find and hire people that will mesh with whatever mix of code your shop is currently running is difficult for technical managers.  It’s completely impossible for HR and non-technical managers.

Now I’m not saying that hiring Perl developers is necessarily any easier.  And I’m not trying to be a Luddite either.  All I’m saying is that new revisions of products come out when current needs aren’t being met.  So we haven’t needed another Perl for a while now.

And Sterling hits on a brilliant point about how poorly the TIOBE index measures current market needs or the current state of code development.  Go figure that a free language doesn’t have a bunch of PR geeks hiring Search Engine Optimization guys to drive up the results of people’s searches.  Microsoft and Sun are literally spending millions of dollars to try in tilt these sort of comparison’s in their favor because it helps them make money.  Then we have to spend our money to learn the new skills, license the new libraries, call for support on their poorly written new projects, etc. etc.

In summary, Perl still kicks much ass and it’s not going anywhere any time soon because the price is right, it does the heavy lifting, has a good community full of nice people like the Perl Monks and Larry Wall is god.

A designer knows he has achieved perfection not when there is nothing left to add, but when there is nothing left to take away.
Antoine de Saint-Exupery

I had Zetrax begin following me a few minutes ago in Twitter. I’m very new at Twitter, so I am a bit suspicious whenever I begin being followed by people I don’t know. Although it appears to happen fairly frequently.

Anyhow, I checked out their profile and there’s not much but a link back to their webpage which allows you to stream music to your computer. The selection seemed pretty good but there’s very little documentation. Basically you just search for music, hit the green PL button to the right side of the stuff you want to listen to. That song is then added to your playlist at the top of the screen. In my case, the playlist didn’t start playing immediately, but I hit the ubiquitous play button at the top left and music did start playing.

I hadn’t heard about this website on Lifehacker yet, as they usually are the first to tell me about new ways to listen to streaming music. So I went off to do some research and it is apparently a REALLY new website. Here’s a guy who did a bit more research than I did at Google Blogoscoped. He looked at the headers and figured out that it’s a mash-up actually pulling audio from youtube.com.

One of Blogoscoped’s commenters complained about the audio. I don’t think it’s superior, but how good does free have to be?

I am not a huge personal fan of streaming music. I used Pandora.com for a while, due to the way it would profile your likes and dislikes, feed them into a recommendation engine, and then try to play you more of the same, but from different artists. I liked some of the recommendations, but it seemed like they ended up playing a lot of b-list music after a while and when they added advertisements I just stopped listening at all.

Now I just ensure that I always have an ipod physically on me somewhere. Plus I can always pull down some music from Rollins Archive and play it locally.

One of the problems I can already foresee with Zetrax is that they’re going to pull some things that are predominantly video streams. I searched for a band called the Minutemen and one of the results was two minutes of some guy’s kid moshing to the Minutemen. I’m sure it might be compelling in video format, but an audio ecstasy it was not.

And as another of Blogoscoped’s commenters pointed out, youtube’s probably not going to be very happy about this when they find out.

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UPDATED at 7:02pm

So I worked on a script to clean up a postfix problem we were having at work.  Imagine my surprise when I logged back into twitter to find that I was being spammed by the Zetrax user?  Check out my post about it here: Zetrax Twitter Spam

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I do receive ad revenue from Google, just to keep things up front and honest. But I’m not going to out these guys, maybe they have something going on with google for all I know.

A Picture Share!
Originally uploaded by russkiypenguin.

Tools of the trade for the on-call