[conspire] CABAL meeting, Saturday, Feb. 8th!

[Deirdre Saoirse Moen]

On Feb 10, 2020, at 04:04, Nick Moffitt <nick at zork.net> wrote:
> 
> On 10Feb2020 02:52am (+0000), paulz at ieee.org wrote:
>> The link below predicts that no one will be using these languages, at least for work, by 2030.  At one time, I thought I was headed to a career as a Perl monger.  I concede that python has largely replaced it.  People seem to think that getting indents correct is easier than ending statements with";"
> 
> Indeed, the fact that Python has succeeded despite the indentation thing is a real testament to its expressiveness and maintainability.

The first time I worked in Python, I had a harder time than average figuring out who wrote what just looking at a file. And maybe that’s part of its charm.

> Perl is a perfectly fine language so long as you never have to touch anyone else's code.  Each Perl programming style is unique, making shared projects difficult without a lot of work beforehand.  Semicolons are not what killed Perl, but rather an extension of this:

I’m so over mandatory semicolons. Every time I need to tweak some JavaScript (for a Node app), I’m like, “Why? Why did you do that?"

> Apologies for the Bob Martin video.  He's problematic in many ways, but the point of the video was the Ward Cunningham quotation.
> 
> 	In short: "It was just too easy to make a mess."

So true, especially of Smalltalk (which is what he’s talking about, and I’ll tell a story about that at the end).

> This was nowhere clearer than in PHP.  I'm sure we've all seen the clawhammer essay, and that's a bit of light fun and captures the experience of doing anything in PHP.  But when you'd explain why you didn't want to use PHP for a particular task, you'd often get one of two smug replies from some accomplished PHP coder:
> 
> 	"A skilled programmer can do anything in any language."
> 
> I used to respond "Sure, Mozart could write grand opera in GERMAN, but does that mean that's the language people should reach for when they're fluent in Italian?"

Why, you might think ROMANIAN might be a perfectly reasonable language to write a song that will ultimately start off an ENGLISH Grammy-winning rap song.

Dragostea Din Tei (aka Numa Numa song): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YnopHCL1Jk8 by Moldovan band O-ZONE, made famous by this viral spud video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KmtzQCSh6xk - making the Moldovan songwriter the only Grammy winner from his country.

Said rap song: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zvnDB93ODko

>  Saying that an expert could carve a sofa with a redwood trunk and a nail file doesn't make those a reasonable choice of tools. Oh and speaking of "tools"...
> 
> 	"A poor workman blames his tools."
> 
> Oh, honey, I'm not blaming *my* tools…


I was hoping Ruby wouldn’t drop off so hard, but frankly its community hasn’t stepped up as much as Python’s has, and it’s tended to support the libraries more than the core. (And yes, I know, I’m part of this too.)

(Completely off-topic for this post, but I was just thinking of Mahir’s ridiculous website the other day and only because we were laughing about it together in 1999.)

Deirdre