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[Editor's Note - This story has been moved up the display queue so that new arrivals can see what has been happening. JR 02-07-22 09:52 UTC]
(Score: 5, Insightful) by janrinok on Thursday June 30 2022, @10:41AM (10 children)
dalek - you take the blame for none of this. The people who are responsible are well known to all of us.
Secondly, thanks for your thoughts regarding solutions. But you must also remember that, without a competent Perl programmer on the team there is little we can do by way of changing the code. It doesn't make any difference to us whether the spammer uses a VPN or open proxy. Many of our AC posts use exactly the same methods. And as technology has improved the IP addresses that they use change every few minutes. Playing whack-a-mole with an almost infinite set of IP addresses is a no-win counter measure.
(Score: 3, Informative) by bzipitidoo on Thursday June 30 2022, @11:17PM (9 children)
Are you serious about there being no competent Perl programmer available? There's an implication in that, that Perl somehow requires special knowledge or training or something. It ain't that hard. I mean, come on, it's just a programming language that isn't all that different in essentials from many another programming language. So you have regexes, hashes, dynamic arrays, and such like goodies that C/C++ doesn't have, and must clumsily add through libraries, so what? Is it the regexes that scares away the COBOL programmers? Or the massive CPAN collection of libraries? Maybe the sigils? I admit having to put a '$' in front of a variable name every time you use it is pretty annoying, but in the big picture, that's a trivial concern. I had no trouble picking up Perl in a day, for a job I had a long time ago.
(Score: 3, Informative) by acid andy on Thursday June 30 2022, @11:47PM
Perhaps the key word in that sentence is "available". I started learning Perl ages ago (but stopped shortly afterwards) and often think to myself I could get up to speed but then I unfortunately am already spread far too thin so realistically can't volunteer.
Master of the science of the art of the science of art.
(Score: 3, Touché) by Anonymous Coward on Friday July 01 2022, @01:33AM
Correct that to "no competent Perl programmer willing to volunteer their personal time to support this site" then. If it's so easy, please feel free to volunteer!
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday July 01 2022, @01:46AM (4 children)
I don't get why people fuss over perl's sigils. They're simpler grammatically than most human languages' gender constructs (la le der die das het den diese etc) since there are actual rules about using them instead of having to memorize lists. It's simpler than having six arbitrary variable names for different aspects of the same function or data set, which (shot of vodka) leads to errors.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by bzipitidoo on Friday July 01 2022, @03:29AM (2 children)
It's redundant, that's why. There are all kinds of ways to assign a type to an identifier that need be done once only. This use of sigils has to be done over and over. It's as if you have to write C like this:
for (int i=99; int i >= 0; int i--){
float a[int i] = 0;
}
A big reason Perl has those '$' characters all over the place is to be like shell scripts. That feature of shell scripting never was a great idea, and should have been dropped.
(Score: 1) by NPC-131072 on Friday July 01 2022, @02:16PM
The dollar symbol identifies a scalar which is a dynamic typed data point -- simultaneously diverse and inclusive. 2/3rds is the best we can do as equality is still lacking in most programming languages. [newdiscourses.com] If SN were rewritten in a Social Justice programming language it would not be possible for fascists to moderate me down!
(Score: 2) by rleigh on Saturday July 02 2022, @11:00AM
The problems go even further though. You can reuse the same name for scalar, array and hash types; probably filehandles as well (it's a while since I've done much Perl, last was the Debian sbuild tool over a decade back). That makes naming potentially very confusing and ambiguous. And on top of that, you use $ when accessing individual array members or hash values, which adds in even more confusion. Perl 6 IIRC fixed the latter.
I used to love Perl, it was a fun language. But some of this stuff was never great. When writing strongly-typed C++ or Java, I've never once thought that sigils would have made the language better. Likewise Python and Lua.
(Score: 2) by tangomargarine on Friday July 01 2022, @06:26PM
I don't get why most of the planet other than English tolerates the conjugation of half their parts of speech either. It's such a pain in the neck to learn.
"Is that really true?" "I just spent the last hour telling you to think for yourself! Didn't you hear anything I said?"
(Score: 2) by captain normal on Saturday July 02 2022, @09:53PM (1 child)
Are you volunteering?
"It is easier to fool someone than it is to convince them that they have been fooled" Mark Twain
(Score: 2) by bzipitidoo on Saturday July 02 2022, @11:07PM
I don't have much time, same problem many others have.