Tag: programming

  • Programming Like It’s 1999

    This article was published yesterday. It shows a way to extract data about a film from IMDB and put it into a local database. Actually, it doesn’t even do that. It produces SQL that you can then run to insert the data. It’s all rather nasty stuff and indicative of the fact that most people…

  • Too Easy or Too Hard

    We hear a lot of people complaining that programming in Perl is too difficult, but I think that a lot of these problems stem from people making the opposite assumption – that writing Perl is easier than it actually is. Let me share a couple of examples. I’ve lightly disguised the companies in question –…

  • Crufty Old Perl

    It’s eighteen months since I wrote “Why Corporates Hate Perl” and it’s worth pointing out that the company I discussed in that article which was dropping Perl in favour of PHP and Java is still employing as many good Perl programmers as it can find. I talked in that article about some rather unsubtle social…

  • A Subway Metaphor

    Many years ago I read a science fiction story which has always stayed with me – although I’m buggered if I can remember the title or the author. It was set in the not too distant future. Another new line was about to be opened on the New York City Subway [In the comments Rozallin…

  • Moose or No Moose

    I’ve known about Moose for some time.The first time I talked about it in a training course was at the Teach-In back in the summer of 2007. It’s been part of my training courses ever since. But even though I was telling people about Moose in my training courses, I wasn’t really making use of…