I don’t believe in fairies. Oops! A fairy died.
I don’t believe in fairies. Oops! Another fairy died.

Shlomi Fish

The prefix “God Said” has the extraordinary logical property of converting any statement that follows it into a true one.

A Jewish Deduction

The Bible dictates that “Thou shalt not seethe [= cook] a kid [= young goat] in his mother’s milk”. To avoid any possibility of breaking that regulation, the Jewish tradition ruled that it also applies to female goats, to mature goats, and to the meat and milk of two completely unrelated goats. It is also forbidden to eat the meat with fresh milk, and it applies to beef and mutton as well (including mixing the milk and meat of two different beasts). Finally, chicken, which are incapable of milk production, may not be eaten along with any mammal’s milk either.

We are fortunate that most mathematicians were not Jewish. Otherwise, it would have been forbidden to divide by all numbers between -1 and 1.

I used to be arrogant. Now I’m simply Perfect.

If the ancient Greeks had invented UNIX, Murphy’s Law would have been known as Aristotle’s Law.

Had they invented MS-Windows, Murphy’s Law would have been known as the Law of Socrates.

Microsoft’s slogan used to be “Microsoft - making it all make sense.”

Today it should be: “Microsoft - making everything make sense. Ours.”

Linux - Because Software Problems Should not Cost Money.

The American Lottery - all you need is a dollar and a dream. We will take the dollar, but you can keep the dream.

Shlomi Fish

“Shit Happens” according to the religions of the world (Deltas by Shlomi Fish)

Judaism: God knows you will do shit, does nothing to prevent it, but makes you take the blame for it anyway.

“Shit Happens” according to the religions of the world
(Deltas by Shlomi Fish)

Judaism: God is all the shit, all the non-shit and all the intermediate demi-shits in between.

Let’s interpret the past according to the present and not the present according to the past.

Shlomi Fish

Computer Science is no more about computers than astronomy is about telescopes

— Edsger W. Dijkstra

Programming Science is no more about computers than astronomy is about stars.

— Shlomi Fish

[Discussing the shortage of IT workers as of 1998 on E-mail]

Shlomi Fish to Omer Zak: “Even the NSA doesn’t have enough programmers. But it is not likely that they will have more, and that’s because Summerschool at the NSA may might as well be the name of Sarah Michelle Gellar’s next movie.”

Omer Zak to Shlomi Fish: “And as opposed to I Know What You Did Last Summer, it is going to be scary.”

Objective philosophy is like a pencil sharpener for one’s mind.

Oh! I wish you could see the look on his face! Actually, I would have also liked to see the look on his face, but just then I woke up from the dream.

Had I not been already insane, I would have long ago driven myself mad.

“Aside from all that, I planned a political simulator that forecast the two World Wars after I entered all the relevant data until the year 1000 AD.”

“Do you have a computer at home?”

“Oh, no! At present the program is written on a paper. Don’t ask how much time it took me to fully eliminate all bugs out of it. But it was great fun!”

“Likewise.” Added the interviewer and said: “Your answers were also very… unusual.”

“Although this description cannot testify on their quality, I take it as a compliment.”

The government of the Supporter will finance your travel, and you will be able to leave tomorrow morning. We would like to inform you of the following facts: we cannot assure your safety during this travel. Furthermore, despite your long service at the Organisation and your constructive proposal, we cannot say, wholeheartedly or halfheartedly, that we wish to protect your safety. Likewise, we cannot guarantee that we would not take actions that may harm you, indirectly or in a direct manner.

We hope to see you here very soon.

“Okay, I think that I can now return to my country and my village. By the way, how many forbidden books do you have?”

“Oh,”, one of them said to me, “their number is growing geometrically. When I checked two weeks ago, their number was 2,148,763. A week ago there were 4,278,109 forbidden writings. Now there must be about 8,600,000 ones.”

“You are wrong.”, I said to him.

“I beg your pardon?”

“There are now exactly 8,517,559 or 8,517,560 forbidden books.”

“Why is it so important?”

“Why, it means that, for the time being, you have 82,440 or 82,441 extra books which you can read at bedtime if you can’t fall asleep!”

“And what is the nature of those activists: Socialists? Communists? Liberals?… ”

“Let’s say, for the sake of simplicity, that they are people of my intellect, only that as opposed to me they are sane.”

A more experienced programmer does not make less bugs. He just realizes what went wrong more quickly.

BTW, for an editor with no replace feature (at least not on Windows 95), no regular-expression search and replace, no indentation support, no syntax-highlighting and no macros and scriptability features: MS Notepad is one hell of an editor!

Suggested Improvements to the Documentation:

The WYSIWYT project was for a long time fascinated by Microsoft’s tremendous desire to advance its Internet Explorer web-browser. We saw the fact that they switched the help systems of the upcoming Windows 98, as well as Microsoft Visual C++ 5.0, to HTML a major step in advancing our project.

As a complementary step, some of the chief heads of our project suggested that the Windows’ manuals themselves, as well as all of Microsoft’s ads, will be designed in HTML and printed after being rendered by IE4. While this project is in the preliminary and planning stages, we expect it to acquire a large momentum soon.

If: 1. A is A.
2. A is not not-A.
does it also imply that:
1. B is B.
2. B is not not-B.

I know I’m blond, but I have to colour my hair brown, so people would not think I’m stupid. Because, like the title of the book says: "You’ve only got Three Seconds".

Actually, since Amazon sent us two books like that, you’ve only got six seconds.

Knuth is not God! It took him two days to build the Roman Empire.

Knuth is not God! God has already released TeX version 4.0.

There is no IGLU Cabal! None of them could pass the Turing test. But strangely enough a computer program they coded, could.

Knuth is not God! Google is not God! RMS is not God!

God himself said that was the case.

Knuth is not God! Typing “God” into Google and pressing “I’m Feeling Lucky” would not lead you to his homepage.

Shlomi Fish in Hackers-IL message No. 2084 ("The Great WWW-Wisdom Shootout")

Knuth is not God! Unless you confuse him with Dijkstra.

(I am patenting issuing a TINIC with anything else but the phrase "There is no IGLU Cabal!". The patent number is kept secret to avoid violating the copyright of its text)

Shlomi Fish in Hackers-IL message No. 2021

C++ supports Object-Oriented Programming, roughly as much as COBOL supports Functional Programming.

I hope that if it had not been clear before, it isn’t less clear now.

Jack: Hi, Sophie!

Sophie: Don’t “Hi, Sophie!” me.

Jack: Don’t “Don’t ‘Hi, Sophie!’ me” me!

My opinions may seem crazy, but they all make sense. Insane sense, but sense nonetheless.

Shlomi, I’m considering naming a corollary of Godwyn’s law after you - any discussion of anything is over when you mention Freecell Solver.

— Muli Ben-Yehuda on #kernelnewbies (irc.kernelnewbies.org)

Muli: BTW, I think that any discussion only begins to gain momentum when I mention Freecell Solver.

— Shlomi Fish on #offtopic (irc.kernelnewbies.org)

There’s no point in keeping an idea to yourself since there’s a 10 to 1 chance that somebody already has it and will share it before you.

An apple a day keeps the doctor away.

Two apples a day will keep two doctors away.

“You are banished! You are banished! You are banished! Hey! I’m just kidding!”

[Discussing Foreign Languages Knowledge in the U.S.A]

Ben Collins-Sussman: Tis’ true, unlike Europe, the language doesn’t change every 100 miles.

Shlomi Fish: And unlike England, the accent does not change every 10 miles.

What happened to Christopher Michael Pilato?
Is he gone?
Is he gone for good?
Is he gone for better?
Is he gone for best?
Is he gone forever?
Will he return?
Who is Christopher Michael Pilato, anyway?

In Philosophy, as much as in software engineering, you don’t get credit for originality. What matters is the final product, not who came up with the idea for each feature first.

He has a high degree of idealism, a high degree of stubbornness, and an even higher degree of inability to distinguish between the two.

> Thanks, applied as change #22936.

And thank you for applying this patch. But to be honest, I’m a little disappointed. I expected it won’t go in so easily and will trigger some discussion here. But there was none. No typo corrections (“you mis-spelled ‘floccinaucinihilipilification’”); no flames ("this patch is the worst thing since non-sliced bread"). Nothing.

Someone should do something about it. This direction is not healthy for p5p. Seriously.

[Commenting in Slashdot after Arnold Schwarzenegger’s decision to use open-source software in the California government:]

> This is obviously because Bill Gates and Steve Jobs are girly-men.

Yeah and what are the offerings of the open-source world? Let’s see:

1. Linus Torvalds - Looks like a dweeb, ergo is a dweeb. How girly is that? (plus his wife can kick ass better than him) 2. Richard M. Stallman - a hippy. How girly is that? 3. Eric S. Raymond - a nice looking man with a mustache. Baby faced, so he looks a bit girly to me. 4. Larry Wall - a cross between Linus and RMS (i.e: a hippy dweeb) that is even more girly.

So who do we have left? Alan Cox? OK, he’s manly. (huge man, huge facial hair, etc.) And all the others are so neglible people don’t even know how they look like.

Note: this comment may have been a bit cruel, so sorry. Don’t take it too seriously, especially if you’re one of the guys I laughed about. I hold you all with the greatest respect. Seriously.

Sincerily yours,
Shlomi Fish (who is a quite girly male himself).

If his programming is anything like his philosophising, he would find ten imaginary bugs in the "Hello World" program.

Hacker sees bug. Hacker does not want bug. Hacker fixes bug.

Tcl is Lisp on drugs. Using strings instead of S-expressions for closures is Evil with one of those gigantic E’s you can find at the beginning of chapters.

Linus Torvalds: "95% of Programmers consider themselves in the top 5%".

Shlomi Fish’s Corollary: "95% of Programmers consider 95% of the code they did not write, in the bottom 5%."

C++ is complex, complexifying and complexified.

(With apologies to the Oxford English Dictionary).

The first phrase that should be taught when teaching a new language is how to say “Do you speak English?”.

The first thing that needs to be taught when teaching a new computer tool is how to exit it.

He who re-invents the wheel, will understand much better how a wheel works.

He who re-invents the wheel, may actually invent a much better wheel.

Shlomi Fish

He who re-invents the wheel will likely design a square wheel and spend a year trying to figure out why it doesn’t work properly.

Nadav Har’El

Sometimes you don’t need to be familiar with a better alternative to know that something sucks. Take Microsoft Word for example.

The difference between a good student and a bad student is that a bad student forgets the material five minutes before the test, while a good student five minutes afterwards.

Real programmers don’t write workarounds. They tell their users to upgrade their software.

Jewish Atheists are the only true Atheists. They beat the hell out of Goy Atheists.

“You know:”, the physicist said, “in my opinion since you left the Organisation you acted without thinking a lot before you did things. I would describe your behaviour as deriving from spontaneousness and fickle‐mindedness that border rashness. Do you also think so?”

“Of course!” I replied, “Except for arrogance, rashness is my only defect!”

The current solution offered by Nvidia may be the second-best solution. But this is one case where the second best solution is not good enough.

If it isn’t in my email, it doesn’t exist.

And if the whole world says one thing and my email says something different, email will conquer.

-- an Israeli Linuxer.

The bad thing about hardware is that it sometimes works and sometimes doesn’t. The good thing about software is that it’s consistent: it always does not work, and it always does not work in exactly the same way.

• Larry Wall can understand the Perl code he wrote last year.
• Larry Wall gets the colon.
• There are at least 137 Larry Walls in the U.S. but only one that matters.
• Larry Wall applies a patch manually quicker than GNU patch.
• Larry Wall dreams in Perl.
• Larry Wall can program in his sleep.
• Larry Wall is lazy, impatient and full of hubris.
• Larry Wall has more dollars in the bank than in his Perl code.

-- Larry Wall facts by Shlomi Fish

Electrical Engineering studies. In the Technion. Been there. Done that. Forgot a lot. Remember too much.

Well, for the record, *I* am without faults, but i’ll mention them here anyways:

1. i really hate scriptaculous
2. i kicked a dog the other day
3. i pushed an old lady aside, on my way to get a cup of free coffee
4. i secretly program in Python
5. i like to interject and make lists

I’m not an actor - I just play one on T.V.

Trying to block Internet pornography is like climbing a waterfall and trying to stay dry.

— Drew Dexter

I’m not straight - I’m Israeli.

Hi Omer! Mazal Tov on Chen and yours marriage. It reminds me of a quote from Charlotte Bronte’s Jane Eyre:

"At this period she married, removed with her husband (a clergyman, an excellent man, almost worthy of such a wife) to a distant county, and consequently was lost to me."

Well, in your case I can say that both of you are almost worthy of each other. Congrats again!

A few weeks ago, I’ve been to Freenode’s #perl, talking to merlyn and other guys, when we got to discuss the Biblical "Tower of Babel Myth". As it turned out, the commonly perceived interpretation was not the one most scholars find as more sensible, which is the one we ended up being taught at Junior High School.

What most people think is something like that:

The people spoke to each other in the same language, concentrated in one place, and decided to build a tower high enough so they can reach God. God, a small dwarf who lived in the sky, was afraid of the efforts of these people, because he feared they’ll reach him. So he casted an 8th level Spell of Language Fragmentation, caused these people to speak in different tongues, and without being able to understand each other, they ended up spreading across the Earth. God was relieved and returned to his dwarfish deeds, as dwarfs do.

Shlomi Fish in (Based on what his Bible teacher said)

We don’t know his cellphone number, and even if we did, we would tell you that we didn’t know it.

plis tak mi auot from yuor mail list.

-- This Engrew sentence contains very few errors.

What do you mean by "WDYM"?

Chen Shapira: spent 5 hours yesterday trying to get Windows to print on my new wireless printer. It still doesn’t work. On Ubuntu it worked after few minutes.

Shlomi Fish: Heh. Linux++ .

Chen Shapira: I’d do Windows-- , but this may result in an integer underflow.

A few days ago I joined #mandriva on Freenode trying to get to the bottom of a problem I have with KMail at work, where I cannot start KAddressBook from inside it. I asked my question and soon afterwards received:

• One Thunderbird recommendation.
• Two Evolution recommendations.
• One Sylpheed Claws recommendation.
• One GMail recommendation.

The problem is that I wasn’t interested to learn about alternative E-mail clients, and just wanted to get my problem solved. And in GMail’s case it was completely out of the question due to my work’s constraints.

I recently had to figure out how to do something with wget: get everything below a directory on the web-server, without following links to outside it. So I logged in to FreeNode’s #debian channel, where there are many knowledgeable people to ask it. The first answer I got was "RTFM". So, I read the wget man page, but could not find it there. Eventually, after telling people that it would be faster to give an answer, I got a reply ( add the -np -r flags). But this has been the last straw.

I composed my own acronym. Just like RTFM is "Read the Fabulous Manual" and STFW is "Search the Fabulous Web", then JATFM is "Just Answer the Fabulous Man". It means that it’s usually faster to answer someone’s question than to ask him to RTFM, which is just going to annoy him. I think the RTFM mantra has done a lot of damage in the UNIX/Linux world, and I hope JATFMing would prove to be a more healthy ideology.

A: I’m busy right now - I have to do TWAIN.

B: Do Shania Twain?

C: Oh, I’d love to do Shania Twain.

—Adapted from a conversation on Freenode’s #perl

I often wonder why I hang out with so many people who are so pedantic. And then I remember - because they are so pedantic.

— an Israeli Perl Monger

<monty-python>

A: You Linux kids are so lucky. When we were using Windows 95 and Windows 3.11 it kept getting stuck and we lost all our data. We had to reboot it.

B: You used Windows 95! Lucky Bastard! When I was your age, we used DOS on CGA screens, and we were lucky if we had 4 colors, much less a true windowing environment.

C: You had DOS with graphics? Lucky bastard! When I was your age, I used VT-100 terminals connected to a VAX. 128 characters should be enough for everybody?

D: Visual Terminals? When I was your age, we used teletypes on a PDP-11: the computer printed on paper - very slowly. Can you imagine cat’ing a really long document?

E: Teletypes were heaven compared to the punch cards that I was using. Imagine going over to the computer with a large amount of punch cards and then dropping them all.

F: Punch cards! What is this talk about punch cards? We input machine code directly using buttons and LEDs.

G: And all we had were NAND gates!

</monty-python>

I met a guy in the bar, talked to her and she gave me her phone number.

Two female dogs talking about modern-life:

Jasmine: It’s so cool! On the Internet, no one knows you’re a dog!

Daisy: Yeah, but everyone can tell right away that you’re a bitch!

[Discussing the shortage of IT workers as of 1998 on E-mail]

Shlomi Fish to Omer Zak: "Even the NSA doesn’t have enough programmers. But it is not likely that they will have more and that’s because ‘Summerschool at the NSA’ may might as well be the name of Sarah Michelle Gellar’s next movie."

Omer Zak to Shlomi Fish: "And as opposed to ‘I Know What You Did Last Summer’ it is going to be scary."

Kilmo: why would you like to make fun of the crypto world ? ;) The NSA does know what you did last summer. And by putting this on the web, they know that you know.

Which may lead to interesting philosophical issues. BTW, in a conference I was attending we were given a sticker saying: "NSA - free email backup".

They still have some issue with the retrieval procedures, but besides of that - they are quite a trusted service.

Shlomi Fish: In my case, I think every random joe can learn a lot about me. Even if he’s not in Google or the NSA or whatever.

Kilmo: Yep. but this is a world-wide service that they offer. (Along with several cooperations, like MI5/6).

Ran Eilam To Shlomi Fish: so what are you working on? Working on a new wiki about unit testing fortunes in freecell?

Well, despite the fact that I hardly publicised my last essay about the "Closed Books", it has been chromatic’d. Rumours are that all the bloggers whose blog posts/essays were deprecated on chromatic’s blog are now rich, famous and the object of the affection of many attractive members of the appropriate sex. Memo to self: prepare a limited edition T-shirt: "My blog post was chromatic’d. I pwn you as a blogger."

Richard M. Stallman (RMS) decides to release his brand-new editor, "Emacs" on the CPAN with its first version 29.999.99. In order to package it, he invokes the trusty ol’ module-starter (see http://search.cpan.org/dist/Module-Starter/) which creates a skeleton of a CPAN distribution for him.

He fills in the skeleton with the actual code of Emacs, types "perl Build.PL", and "./Build test" and makes sure all the tests pass. Then he types "./Build config --gui" and gets a nice GUI to configure the various parameters of the Module meta-data.[M-B-Data]

In the GUI, Richard goes to the Trove categorisation tab, and selects categories. This is done in a similar way to Freshmeat’s project categorisation dialog (a list of options to the left, with selected options to the right and arrows to move them left or right, while allowing multiple select options.). He chooses such categories as "Programming Language :: Lisp", and "Intended Audience :: Emacs Users", "Operating System :: GNU", and "Topic :: Editors". (Note: I believe the category list should be fetched using a public web-service to keep them up-to-date.)

After several weeks of having the editor on CPAN, Richard has received many patches, and wrote a lot of code on his own. Now Emacs is not only an editor but a calendar tool, an Eliza program, a web browser, a mail user agent and many other things.

So in order to release version 30.000.00 he needs to update the categorisation. He runs ./Build config --gui again, and adds more categories. However, he enters too many categories (because Emacs now does them all), and the GUI refuses to save the file because it will overflow the limit that the web-service specified the CPAN classification services allow to handle. So Richard keeps only the important categories, adds more tags, and saves it.

He then tests the distribution again, and uploads the new distribution to the CPAN.

Bill Gates, CEO of Microsoft decides to use Richard Stallman’s Emacs as the basis of his company’s state-of-the-art product Microsoft Editing Macros™ Enterprise Edition XP .NET Professional. However since MS Editing Macros™ is a commercial, proprietary program which he intends to sell at computer stores, Bill is not going to upload it to the CPAN. He builds upon Emacs, sends patches to Richard and learns a lot about it.

When he’s finished building Microsoft Editing Macros™ he surfs to the Emacs homepage on CPAN, and adds some categories and tags of his own.

Eventually, enough people like Bill tag and categorise Emacs, and it gains more classification.

Larry: final exams are on Tuesday and through Friday, so you won’t see me for a while, or if you do - then you should shoot me.

Shlomi: I Will shoot you with my cross-intertubes-laser-gun.

Larry: HAHAHA.

Shlomi: Which I don’t have.

Larry: Which network topology will you implement, for better accuracy ?

Shlomi: I’ll just depend on the standard TCP/IP routing. Overlay the laser on top of the TCP packets.

God gave us two eyes and ten fingers so we will type five times as much as we read.

Only wimps complain about bad code. Real men clean it up.

Shlomi Fish

Wikipedia has a page about everything including the http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kitchen_sink .

shlomif: hack, hack, hack ; save ; make ; make test; commit. And start over.

mrjink:hack, hack, hack; save; make; swear; fix typos; save; make; make test; swear some more; hack some more; save; make; make test; cheer; commit.

meep: hack, make, test, segfault, oh noes, revert to previous revision

Well, it’s not a threat - it’s a warning, and he won’t be harmed much by acting against my advice. A threat is something like "Stop posting political posts or I will burn your house, rape your wife and daughters, banish you to the middle of Antarctica, convert all your Perl code to PHP, and then post it on thedailywtf.com."

Regarding what you say that "no one cares if you unsubscribe", then this reminds me of what Fred Brooks says in "The Mythical Man-Month": "How does a project becomes late? One day at a time.". If you’re not careful, you might lose a large percent of your blog’s readership, one subscriber at a time.

What does "IDK" stand for? I don’t know.

PHP error debug list:

1) did you use the correct argument order? if you’re a good programmer, use the *reverse* from what you think it is. see if it works. no? you’re not a good programmer, or you learned php’s braindeadness and can go on to step 2).

2) did you think about your code? if so, don’t. php will do it for you so you can do mindbogglingly stupid stuff, such as not escape the data that goes into your sql queries.

Give me ASCII or give me deaþ!

In the Technion, there are many ways to get from one place to the other, but they are all the same length.

English spelling aims to be consistent. Publicly and methodically.

Mike “The Mouse” House (a.k.a “D.J. Salinger”) was a minor rap artist, and a computer geek when he decided to start selling CDs of open-source software. He turned to spamming to publicise his business, but found out that the spam he sent was trapped by most spam traps. He decided to use the notorious obscured image spam, but since he had a few blind friends, decided to also include an audio recording of a rap song with the spam message.

House received a few offers from his spam campaign, but his real break came when a few enthusiasts of the spam song shared it on the Internet, where it became an instant hit. The song eventually hit the charts and MTV, and made D.J. Salinger famous, who quickly released his first successful album called Rap to the spam, Ma’am!, with such highly acclaimed hits as “Rap to not get trapped” and “He ain’t Nigerian. He’s a Spammer!”.

As a millionaire, House decided to donate some of his money back to sponsoring open-source projects, and has donated 100,000’s of U.S. Dollars to such causes as the Free Software Foundation, Linux International and SpamAssassin. “If it hadn’t been for them, I wouldn’t have made it big”, he said, and said he’s now working on a second album with a similar theme.

I promised, I forgot, I did not keep my promise — just shoot me, and get on with it!

An original philosopher knows the right combination of ideas to steal.

• To err is human - to apologise - divine.
• To have bugs is human - to fix them - divine.
• To have bugs is human - to find them - divine.

I might be mad. But I’m a mad genius.

If God exists and is the ego-maniacal, sadistic and helpless creature that is described in the Old Testament, then we’re in deep trouble.

Sophie: Let’s suppose you have a table with 2^n cups…
Jack: Wait a second - is ‘n’ a natural number?

A kid always wishes they were older until they are 18. Afterwards, they always wish they were younger.

Shlomi’s Father: If you don’t sort the dishwasher, the dishwasher won’t be sorted.

Shlomi: No, it won’t be sorted by me.

Shlomi’s Father: No, it won’t be sorted at all. We will throw away the dishwasher.

Together: Along with all the dishes.

All languages of the world suck. If you require people to declare variables (like in Pascal, C, Scheme or Perl 5 with strict), then people will tell you they like variables to spring up upon first use. Without variable declarations, then you get various weird side-effects of the implicit scoping. If you use curly braces for scoping, then you’ll have to type more and there’s more clutter. With indentation-based scoping (like in Python), you’ll find it hard to introduce multiple-expression lambdas.

Rob Pike and Paul Graham hated object oriented programming (OOP) and so they didn’t introduce it in their “Go” and “Arc“ languages, well after OOP has become mainstream. And guess what? Many people, including me, think that OOP is still a good thing (and no, in my opinion, C++ did not do OOP very well) and so gave up on Arc quickly and did not look closely at Go.

Dynamically typed languages (like Perl 5, Python, Ruby, or Lisp) possibly suffer from many subtle errors ; Statically typed languages (like Haskell) are less expressive and it seems that about one third of the language design papers published on Lambda the Ultimate are about various funky extensions to the Haskell type system to allow for better expressiveness.

Purely functional languages have no assignment and most people find them harder, in part because the world around us has a lot of state, and they also need to do funky compiler tricks to make you feel like you don’t need assignment. Non-functional languages have side-effects and so are prone to many errors.

If you have goto or goto-like statements (such as exceptions or Perl 5’s “last LABEL;” (more like “break” in C) or “next LABEL;”), then you encourage code to not be factored correctly. If you don’t have such stuff, then programmers will hate you for having to go through many hoops to write quick-and-dirty code.

Perl 5 has a dedicated regular expression syntax which is treated magically by the parser. PHP and Java use strings for them, and require weird escaping and backslashing rules to interpolate the sub-regexes inside them. And if you incorporate a first-order syntax for regular expressions, then people will want similar first-order syntaxes for XPath, for XML (like some recent versions of Visual Basic .NET have), and for all other grammars you may need to embed.

Finally, many people absolutely hate all the clutter created by the leading sigils of Perl 5 (the "$", "@", etc.), and similar languages, but they allow for much better backward compatibility, facilitate the so-called “interpolation” (= embedding inside strings), and also give some important visual cues when skimming code (even without syntax highlighting).

You are damned either way, whatever you do.

• 1 User to start a http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Changing_a_Light_Bulb article.
• 1 editor to tag it with the “No original research” template. (Without giving a reason)
• 3 users to find citations for the article.
• 1 editor to claim it violates the wikipedia “Neutral Point of View policy”. (without giving a reason).
• The original user to ask why he thinks this way on the talk page.
• 5 users to find occurences of changing a light bulb in popular culture.
• 1 anonymous user to correct an “it’s” to “its”.
• 1 editor to revert it.
• 1 editor to revert the revert because it was a real typo.
• 10 users to rant in the talk page that Changing a lightbulb is not notable enough.
• 10 Wikipeders to start similar articles in French, German, Spanish, Catalan, Esperanto, Ido, Hebrew, Klingon, Mandarin Chinese, and other languages.
• 10 more people to periodically keep the articles in sync with the English version.
• Starting the cycle again on the localised wikipedias.
• 1 Person to argue that the article should be merged into the main article about the inventor of the lightbulb.
• 5 People to argue on the talk-page who the inventor of the lightbulb was.
• 1 Person to start a wikiquote page about changing lightbulbs.
• 1 Person to add it to wikibook.
• 4 persons to gradually delete content the section about “choosing a good chair” until it only reads “choose a good chair.”
• 1 person to write it again.
• 1 deletionist to remove the article due to all of its perceived problems.
• 3 months from now:
• 1 different user to feel the absense of the Changing_a_Light_Bulb article, create it and start the cycle all over again.

As expected from the latest trend in the Perl blogosphere this post will be about Roles. And Moose! And Roles in Moose! And Moose in Roles! And Roles outside Moose…

Seriously now, this is a post about a completely non-Moosey and non-Roley script I wrote to filter the use.perl.org master journals' feed.

E-mail, web feeds and doing something productive — choose two.

The worst way to waste your time is to never waste it.

Sophie: I’m hungry today.
Jack: well wait until tomorrow - maybe this feeling will pass.

We agree. But do we agree to agree?

sed and awk make me sad and awkward.

The English Wikipedia: now you don’t see it - now you do.

I recall discussing Buffy with a Jewish American friend, who used to be secular, and now has become an observant Jew, and married a woman who properly converted to Orthodox Judaism, and they have some children. We discussed the fact that Sarah Michelle Gellar was Jewish, and yet that many men (and some Lesbian women) were more attracted to Alyson Hannigan’s character, Willow Rosenberg, who was a shy and sheepish, redhead, Jewess. Then when I mentioned that Hannigan was only a maternal Jew, he said she is “kosher” (because someone whose mother is Jewish and who did not convert to a different religion, is a bona-fide Jew). I found it amusing that you refer to women by the same word as you do to food, but I think the ancient Hebrew word "kasher" also means "approved", "appropriate", "legal", etc.

In any case, both Hannigan and Gellar are now married, and so trying to separate between them and their husbands is not kosher. ;-)

The Israelites and the Philistines schedule a large battle. The Philistines have far superior equipment with armours made out of cast iron, which the Israelites don’t have. Eventually, Goliath, a tall Philistine giant, steps forward and asks for an Israelite man worthy enough to fight him and determine the fate of the battle (something which was quite common in the ancient Near East). It seems the Israelites will lose the battle.

Out of nowhere, a young Israelite boy whom hardly anyone knew about steps forward with a sling and a few pebbles. Goliath thinks this is ridiculous and ridicules him. However, the boy quickly puts a pebble in his sling, and after rotating the sling to achieve a very large velocity (not unusual with slings) hurls the pebble with great accuracy (also not unthinkable, because shepherds in the Near East effectively used slings to kill lions and other predators to their flock) into Goliath’s face, which was uncovered to allow him to see. Even if Goliath’s shield bearer wanted to, he could not lift the huge shield in time, and Goliath was completely not agile in his suit and armour. The sling’s rock smashes Goliath brain, and he falls to the ground dead. The Israelites have won the battle.

That boy’s name was David.

Why is it important here? Because David was a “hacker”. Why was he a hacker? Because he knew the rules, and played by them, but knew how to bend them, in order to earn his victory. Hackers bend the rules.

And here’s the thing: this is what an action hero is all about: he makes his own rules, or he even breaks them, and does not accept his fate. This is whereas a tragic hero is bound by many invisible rules, and accepts his fate, which is, almost certainly going to be death.

And in real life, you should also aim to be a hacker or an action hero, or the many phrases it used to be called.