To me, Perl represents the most organic language out there. It arose from a collection of traits in other languages and macro vocabularies. It's held together by a series of lexical assumptions that work because they mirror our intuition.
But even more, it's kind of the anarchy zone. You can write whatever type of code you want. However, the people who make readable, clean, efficient, and functional code are the ones who rise.
With CPAN, and the ingenuity of millions of Perl hackers, there's nothing it can't do. If you've never tried it, play around in it awhile. You might like it... and stay forever.
I first tried perl (and programming in general) back in the mid 90's when I got tired of writing HTML via Word macros and wanted something more interesting. This was perl4 (oraperl to be exact since DBI didn't exist). I haven't looked back.
I agree. Perl is great and often the fastest way to git 'r done, especially across multiple operating systems.
Perl got a bad rep for two reasons. First, writers of boutique languages wanted a reason to feel good about themselves. Second, certain segments of the Perl community (I won't name names) insisted on writing obfuscated, baffling code that read like line noise from a modem.
The Perl community counteracted this, but there were still enough of these people out there to give it a bad rap.
In the meantime, if you're a Perl programmer who can write functional, efficient, clean and readable code, there's no shortage of stimulating work.
I don't think it's dead. I think a lot of people romanticize things like Bitcoin as being part of a world that's lawless relative to the real one. And as hackers, it's one where the lack of order favors them, just as the lack of order in the Wild West favored those with the most horses and guns.
I'm not sure that analogy plays out well for hackers in the long term. Ultimately, the wild west was not won by cowboys with some horses and guns, but large-scale ranchers with title to hundreds of thousands of acres. The cowboys may still have movies made about them, but the likes of King Ranch came out on top economically.
I believe it is more correct to think of cowboys along the terms of freelancers and lifestyle business folks... people who don't need massive success, just freedom from having to be at a highly structured job from 9-5.
Or at least that is the idea that I get from the many I know or have met.
In that sense, the larger market "winners" like the king ranch aren't really a factor, except as their presence begins to foment regulations that must apply to every single person and begin to restructure the world into one where it is increasingly difficult to live outside of a corporate structure.... ie. they fence off formerly commonly held land.
Yeah, there are some fairly lawless places on Earth today and you don't see many people (other than rdl) moving there to make their fortune. People subconsciously prefer the rule of law but it's cool to romanticize Bitcoin data havens and whatnot.
Nope. A casual perusal of Hacker News and reddit will show this mentality is very much alive, and that people believe this is the only way the internet should be. Free, international waters where anything goes and there shouldn't be any government involvement.
The Apple //e was the hacker-friendliest machine ever. It's probably the ideal learning platform for anyone looking to go into computer science, although perhaps not app programming as a career, which requires a narrower skill set and more focus.
I was a die-hard Apple fan until the Mac came out, which felt like a betrayal to the original Wozniak-driven Apple philosophy. The PC, ironically, became the continuation of what Apple meant to me.
I suspect that their experience with the //e influenced the decision to make the Mac a closed box. Like you, I found the PC to be a much more comfortable transition.
Because the Apple ][ was a locked design, folks started poking directly into ROM and RAM locations, for instance directly manipulating system variables, or even jumping into the middle of ROM subroutines. A book called "What's Where in the Apple II" documented almost every known hook.
My mom had that book. She's my hacker role model.
As a result of the way that software interacted, it became virtually impossible for Apple to update the ROMs without breaking popular apps.
The next generation of personal computers all represented different approaches to avoiding this problem by providing well documented entry points while offering no guarantee of long term code stability. IBM made one mistake: They let people hard code the address of video RAM, which is what led to the legendary 640k barrier.
Having BASIC (or another language) built into the machine was a big plus and encouraged people to see continuity between the OS, the hardware and the code.
If that BASIC had to use built-in functions and data-types instead of simply POKE-ing and PEEKING-ing as a de facto interface with the underlying machine code, that would still have been hacker-friendly without being inflexible.
It was such a weird relationship between desktop machines and UNIXes back then. It's like the desktop designers had to re-learn the lessons of UNIX in the small. So much was forgotten.
I agree. In my view, the "walled garden" of iOS is just the next step in what Apple had already intended to establish for the original Mac. To be charitable, I can imagine it being based on the idea of protecting the user from Bad Software.
But lots of us wanted to write Bad Software such as little programs for our own use, or for limited, specialized use by other people. I found the Mac programming docs (Inside Mac) to be impenetrable, and the overhead for writing Hello World enormous.
Then I fell in love with HyperCard. But we all know what happened to that.
> In my view, the "walled garden" of iOS is just the next step in what Apple had already intended to establish for the original Mac.
I imagine this is a quandary that shows up not in computing, but anywhere that users interact with a single source of definitive rules.
For example, it might be easier for government to erect certain walled gardens... or for companies to do this with their employees, parents with their kids, etc.
It's not that I don't understand their position or view it as probably the best way to herd cats (I mean, "consumers").
But hacker-friendliness is what gets you the top echelon of users drifting toward your hardware and software. As a result, it's a huge (but invisible) business draw.
My mom was a high school teacher in a small rural district with a Ford plant. In the early 80's, she took a couple of programming classes as a hedge against possible layoff, and ended up starting a class at her school. She paid for the computers out of her own pocket, and class met before the regular school day.
It should be noted that during this time period, outside of a few affluent districts, virtually all teaching of programming at the K-12 level was done on an ad hoc basis by teachers who volunteered their time and money.
Is this sort of anti-hack mentality one of the reasons why, in some versions of ProDOS, there was a conscious decision to omit the assembler, and to encourage programmers to use BASIC? (Our version, in this article, for example, had no assembler; only BASIC and the monitor program.)
When I was young, I learned to program assembly via machine code on an enhanced //e, with no references. I figured out the instruction set by making a program with all possible opcodes and dumping it out, and would write code by inputting the hex directly after assembling it by hand.
The day I discovered the mini-assembler was absolutely mind-blowing.
The mini assembler was in the integer basic ROMS. Prodos didn't support integer basic (hence no mini assembler) but the later enhanced //e roms also had the mini assembler.
I have very fond memories of the Apple //e (and I have some with broken PSUs that I must get around to fixing) I bootstrapped my own assembler on DOS3.3 using the mini-assembler.
On Prodos I bought the full development kit which came with an assembler and a nice debugger. Wrote a Forth for the Apple with help from Loeligers Threaded Interpretive Languages and a copy of Starting Forth by Leo Brodie (both borrowed from the library) good times...
Mini-assembler was in all II, II+ and //e. II had Integer Basic, II+ and //e had Applesoft. Can't remember which ones had SWEET16 though. May also be "all of them".
If all you want is LISP, burn it into an EPROM and replace the stock one.
It was absent from the II+ due to the larger Applesoft BASIC interpreter. If you had a "Language Card" (a 16K expansion that brought the machine to 64K) you could load Integer BASIC on the card and use the assembler.
Also in the original II and II Plus. On those older models, I think you need to type "F666G" at the monitor prompt to get to the mini-assembler. The "!" command was implemented in the enhanced IIe ROM.
Sounds familiar; I used to use it on our II+, so I was rather bemused by all these people telling me they (II+) didn't have it.
I don't have access to my Apples at the moment, so can't check the details, but I'm now curious to know exactly what might have changed between various II+ - what did others gain that we were missing, or why did we have room for it when they didn't...
Same here. I went from an Apple IIe to a Macintosh SE. It was a nice computer for typing high school papers on (yay PageMaker 1.0), and the GUI of System 5 was beautiful on the little black-and-white screen. There was some hacking involving fonts, inits, and ResEdit, but despite despite getting a C compiler and a few books, I never was comfortable programming on it, and always felt like there was something missing.
Two years later I got a '386 clone, bought Turbo C and all the fun came back at once.
This was my experience exactly. I loved the open Apple //, even though it had limited growth potential. I found the Macintosh to be confining (and still do, although more in an interface design sense now).
This is great advice. I have a long list of projects I wish I'd done with the intent of accomplishing and then telling people about, as it would force me to get them done and make them into contributions.
Many are small, others would have made me wealthier.
In all cases, I didn't engage them because I didn't feel they were significant "enough" or lacked the confidence to simply dive and do them, and missed an opportunity as a result.
Almost all of them would have been accomplish-able in a weekend or afternoon, with another half-hour spent writing a blog about it. You don't need much detail, but it takes some mental work to distill the project to a simple statement that people will enjoy reading.
Regrets? Sometimes. More so for having failed to cultivate in myself a culture of getting stuff done and pushing it away from my desk into the world at large, so others can build on it.
"I could have done more" is the statement of someone who realizes in retrospect the value of his time.
You could separate out the behaviors that aren't bad from those that are, and document the bad ones, then bring that to a manager and ask for some help.
> I am told that my technical competence is undeniable but I'm way too introverted to be hired
My sympathy, because I can imagine this must be puzzling.
From experience, my analysis tree would go like this:
1. Is this a euphemism or excuse? Euphemisms can be used to cover up other meanings like "you look like a serial killer" or "bathe more." You might want to pursue those angles. Excuses can cover things like you wanting too much money, or being too strong in your opinions or knowledge. (Remember, the machine wants cogs, not governors.)
2. If you think it's actually what they mean, I'd look at the word as they're going to use it, which means "socially withdrawn" and not its actual meaning. Then I'd check these:
(a) Does my appearance scream "socialization difficulty"? Did I wear a monk's habit to the job interview, or talk about 1980s classic videogames too much?
(b) Does my behavior scream "socialization difficulty"? If so, I'd approach this as you would any other technical problem. Find some "normals" to observe and pretend you're James Bond, super spy, and imitate them. You must infiltrate the hive and shut off the reactor.
3. If none of the above are checked: something else is making them nervous. Talk to a recruiter, psychologist or other and have them observe you. Also, make sure no parts of your life or resume scream "serial killer" or "probably molests goats."
4. If that's not the case, think about where you're applying. The machine loves cogs -- I said that already -- but sometimes, silly people in charge of silly companies want cheerful happy cheerleader types who will socialize a lot, get really excited over foosball, etc. They like these because they're tractable and easily manipulated. These silly companies tend to be tech sweatshops that assess you based on the amount of code you grind, not how good it is. Do you want to work there anyway? If you do, you're going to have to play Halloween dress-up and imitate what they want.
I will never support bias against introverted people just so that there can be the illusion (sorry, I mean "appearance") of a happy enthusiastic go-get-'em workplace. That's just silly. But if your appearance or behavior makes other people nervous, and they're not nitwits, you might consider adopting a little bit of a charade so you can work with these people.
I look good but I speak too softly and I don't know how to improvise in conversations. So for a one-to-one technical conversation I have no problem but for casual chats within a group, I just listen and get nervous if the attention is on me. It's due to a lack of experience in talking (and being talked to) combined to perfectionism. The problem is that I need a job soon, not after several years of trying to gain this experience.
I chose to learn programming thinking the job would just be me and a computer, referring to one boss, but there seems to be more meetings and customer interactions than I hoped. Other commenters said that more quiet programming jobs exist so I'll keep sending my resume to companies who build their own softwares instead of agencies. I'm just a bit despaired that no one wants to let me work.
In a more long-term way, I'm trying to create my own business (disrupt Facebook!). If I can't be the employee, I must become the employer.
Being introverted is one thing, being socially awkward and getting nervous when people talking to you can be a hindrance. If you expect to create your own business, the most important aspect will be customer interaction; you will need to get past these issues in order to be successful.
I must admit that last sentence certainly isn't without irony!
Seriously though, I wish you the best of luck. My advice would be to get yourself a good portfolio assembled and then maybe approach small- to medium-sized companies and just be open and frank with them. If you can demonstrate you have the skills there will be someone out there who is happy just to have someone sat coding up briefs, reporting only to them. Larger companies might find it more difficult to get around the mindset that meetings are universally important and everyone eventually wants to be a manager. A small business owner might see someone like you as a godsend if you help them understand that in return for being largely undisturbed (in a social, obv not work sense!) you will be loyal and productive.
I've been dealing with similar issues for a couple of years now. At the worst point I was unable to talk in groups of unfamiliar people without my heart rapidly pounding and face flushing. Not sure if it's quite that bad for you, but I'd recommend googling social anxiety. After learning about that I ended up working with a therapist and taking a year of improv classes. This was by far the best thing I've ever done and really helped my conversation skills. It'll also help with your confidence, which will in turn reduce your nervousness.
Feel free to message me if you'd like to talk more.
To me, Perl represents the most organic language out there. It arose from a collection of traits in other languages and macro vocabularies. It's held together by a series of lexical assumptions that work because they mirror our intuition.
But even more, it's kind of the anarchy zone. You can write whatever type of code you want. However, the people who make readable, clean, efficient, and functional code are the ones who rise.
With CPAN, and the ingenuity of millions of Perl hackers, there's nothing it can't do. If you've never tried it, play around in it awhile. You might like it... and stay forever.