http://qs321.pair.com?node_id=1200761

If you are of a certain age and have been developing for the web for long enough, you will recognize a lot of the details in CmdrTaco's meditation on the beginnings of Slashdot on its 20th birthday, from watching the output of tailing your Apache referrers log in amazement, to the Kai's Power Tools drop shadow on the logos. Good times! (Too bad he doesn't mention that the whole thing was built in Perl.)


The way forward always starts with a minimal test.

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Re: [OT] Slashdot is 20
by eyepopslikeamosquito (Archbishop) on Oct 06, 2017 at 02:23 UTC

    As for CmdrTaco's career as a Perl Monk, well, he was not very prolific. :)

    That said, note that The Rob Malda Rule: - though supposedly penned by the gods on Sep 08 1999 - was probably authored by CmdrTaco. Though CmdrTaco's home node says "Writeups: None", if you click on "None" you'll find another node authored by CmdrTaco namely Counting Substrings in Strings - curiously, his (two sentence) Perl question was asked on Oct 27 1999, two months before Perl Monks opened its doors to the public! His only known Perl Monks node suggests CmdrTaco was hardly a Perl expert back then, and he was duly counselled by chromatic and audreyt (who suggested using the goatse secret operator years before it was known by that unfortunate name :).

    Full details on early Perl monks history can be found at: The First Ten Perl Monks

    Update: His immortal two sentences uttered at the dawn of Perl Monks were:

    Sentence one:

    Whats a clean way to count the occurances of a substring withing a string?
    I guess there was no feature to edit typos back then:
    Whats -> What's
    occurances -> occurrences
    withing -> within

    Sentence two:

    I've been using $x++ while /foo/g; to count the occurances of 'foo' within $_, but it really seems like $x=/foo/g; ought to (in scaler context) return a count, but for some reason it always returns either undef or 1 (eg, a boolean).
    A much longer sentence yet still only three typos:
    occurances -> occurrences
    scaler -> scalar
    eg -> e.g.

      …that unfortunate name…

      Unfortunate? Nay, sir. Immortal!

Re: [OT] Slashdot is 20
by Anonymous Monk on Oct 05, 2017 at 23:02 UTC

    You insensitive clod, why are making me and Slashdot feel olde?