Archive for the tag 'technology'

"Premature optimization is the root of all evil." -Larry Wall, creator of PERL

amit October 22nd, 2005

I got a mail from Gent, my boss, reminding us (all developers at nSoftware) about the evils of optimization. The quote is originally attributed to C.A. Hoare, restated by Knuth, and I guess restated by Larry Wall. It reminded me of a bunch of quotes on Perl …

"Perl is the only language where you can bang your head on the keyboard and it compiles."
-anybody who has programmed more than 100 lines of perl can attest to that.

"Normally, Perl minds its own business about your programming habits."
Chapter 4 of Programming Perl

A good language should try (and I mean real hard) to make some sense of anything thrown at it and should not dictate programming style. Leave the readability, maintainability and all the other ..ilities to the programmer, sometimes we are high on weed, on most other occasions we know what we are doing.

A good example of this approach is the private members in python and perl, they are inaccessible by style and convention (they are named a certain way, and its uncool to access them from outside the class), not enforced by a NAZI compiler.

"Just because there’s more than one way to do it doesn’t mean that all ways are equally cool."
Learning Perl, Ch. 16

The compiler does not enforce indentation or naming conventions; I have seen few badly indented programs with bad variable names. It’s simply not cool to do so.

"Is there an ISO or ANSI certified version of Perl?"
Certainly not. Larry (Wall) expects that he’ll be certified before Perl is.
http://www.perldoc.com/perl5.6/pod/perlfaq2.html

Compare the IEEE specs with RFC’s. The former precise in their language, incomprehensible in their intent, the latter scattered with inaccuracies (“MUST NOT”, “SHOULD NOT” etc), yet easy to understand. Loose standards are good they foster interoperability; albeit with hacks. Rigid standards, even though precisely defined are evil.

"Many people, when confronted with a problem, will think, ‘Ah! I’ll use a regular expression!’ Now they have two problems. And then they think "Ah, well I’ll just read the documentation", and then they have three problems."
-perl

“Let’s say the docs present a simplified view of reality… -)”
-Larry Wall

Documentation is simply a crutch holding up a lame API. Intellisense is the most documentation you can afford and for some of us (vi and emacs people) even that is a stretch. Why can’t you simply read my mind?

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Customary "Hello World" entry …

amit September 25th, 2005

Let me first acknowledge the tools that I used to build this site. A little bit of googling revealed such gems that I could not resist trying them out and putting up a blog of my own.

The first thing I needed was a decent design, that I could easily modify to suit my taste. I stumbled upon Open Source Web Design, which has a huge collection. All well categorized by color schemes (light on dark, dark on light etc), html validations (html 4.0 strict, XHTML etc), frames (with or without), site types (business or personal) and use of stylesheets. I downloaded a bunch of designs that I liked and by the end of the day picked up enough skills and inspiration to come up with my own.

Next thing I needed was a blogging software, that used flat files for data storage and was amenable to look and feel modifications. I recalled my friend Nihar mentioning that he really liked Pivot and thought I would give it a shot. It turned out to be beautiful, decent features, flexible yet extensible and simple to set up.

So the easy part’s is done, now comes the real challenge … posting.

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