More visual humour

[jack]

And in the René Magritte[1] stakes, in the staionary cupboard there is a box of invisible tape -- that doesn't have anything in! Truth in advertising?

[1] René Magritte famously produced a painting of a pipe captioned Ceci n'est pas une pipe, or as perl programmers would say, !/|/.

Comments

[uisgebeatha.livejournal.com]

Heh, I have to lambast Perl, ASP, PHP, JSP, Servlets, Apache Tomcat and IIS for this essay! Hard work finding good things about some of those, actually.

Perl was OK once I got my head round it, but a) regular expressions make baby Jesus cry, b) All the programs look like $%^&*£/\@~# which is Not Java Dammit*, and c) regular expressions are so bad I thought I'd mention them twice.

Interestingly, I got on better with PHP, which is Perl's slightly nicer non-hillbilly cousin, sans the buck teeth and webbed feet. Who needs Perl anyway, eh?


*I bet someone will tell me that's a valid line of Perl and I'll cry. ;_;

[pseudomonas.livejournal.com]

Ah, a fan of the quick java sixteen-liner?

[uisgebeatha.livejournal.com]

Pardon my novice-ness, but is that a special magic bit of Java code? Or is it a jab at the oh-so-concise public static void main (String [] args) of it all? ;)

(For the record, I have learned other languages alongside Java this year, but Java was given priority because it's fairly easy to pick up and employable, or so they tell me....)

[pseudomonas.livejournal.com]

It's the java equivalent of a perl one-liner :)

[pseudomonas.livejournal.com]

No, but $%^*&/\@~# is valid perl. Doesn't do anything interesting, though.

[uisgebeatha.livejournal.com]

*weeps*

I'll be happy if I never have to work with Perl again. Give me a language that doesn't make me look like $_$ by the end of it and I'll be happy!

[pseudomonas.livejournal.com]

You just need to embrace the Way Of The Punctutation.

[uisgebeatha.livejournal.com]

Nooes! Java is the One True Way, or so my lecturers told me! Well, I don't mind PHP, but I might as well stick to what I'm good at, eh? ;)


Aside: I peeked at your userinfo and see you've listed Edinburgh and the Uni- are you also a fellow Edinburger? Oh, and yay for dead languages, from a former Classicist. :)

[pseudomonas.livejournal.com]

Former Edinburger (and going back there on Sunday), and current Cantabrigian, formerly Londoner and Oxonian.

[uisgebeatha.livejournal.com]

Cool- fellow Edinburger right here, so if you feel like wibbling about programming languages when you're up just holler. ;) I might be becoming a Cantabrigian again if job application d00m goes well. Nice to see yet another geek who hasn't ripped me to shreds for being such a n00b. :)

[pseudomonas.livejournal.com]

Nice to see yet another geek who hasn't ripped me to shreds

But I thought I *had*...

[robhu.livejournal.com]

To compare Perl to PHP is practically blasphemy.

[uisgebeatha.livejournal.com]

Heh, it was another geek that said it, not I. It kind of looks like it, but I refuse to believe that PHP started out as a couple of modified bits of Perl.

Sorry if I have blasphemed; I am but a trainee geek, so forgive me. *flagellates self with USB cable* ^_~

[robhu.livejournal.com]

http://tnx.nl/php

[uisgebeatha.livejournal.com]

*ROFL*

Scarily, I used mysql_real_escape_string, mysql_connect and a lot of those random array functions in my group project. That kind of makes me feel better taht I plunged myself into it and kind of understood it. You never know, it might be an Employable Skill^tm and all that...

PS- Loving the Firefox icon. If I have anything going for me besides poking PHP, I do at least swear by the better browser. :)

[cartesiandaemon.livejournal.com]

When I learnt PHP I thought of it as, even leaving aside the C syntax, midway between C and perl. This metaphor worked to the extent that when I learnt Perl I guessed quite well what it could do, in that those bits of PHP that weren't C.

regular expressions are so bad I thought I'd mention them twice.

They're great for matching simple strings. The trouble is they *can* be used to match complicatd things, so people *do*. We need something better, that's less unreadable -- putting regexs in variables and building up like that helps a bit, but people always think that because they CAN do it all in one line they SHOULD...

Heh, I have to lambast Perl, ASP, PHP, JSP, Servlets, Apache Tomcat and IIS for this essay!

Cool. I could probably write 5k words about the names alone ".. really really really ... stupid"