She also maintains that I think the world was made in perl, to which the only possible answer is that it can't have been - it wouldn't have taken 7 days :-)

Possibly even scarier, I once debugged a colleagues regex over lunch, without the aid of PC, paper, or pen. We sat there for half an hour saying things like: 's slash tilde backslash s curly bracket 4 close curly bracket backslash w plus.....'. We got a few odd looks, to say the least.

Now imagine the blind perl programmer and the output of his screen-reader.
Perl code is hard enough to read for someone that can see. This is no mean feat. Respect.


holli, /regexed monk/

I'm known for typing and writing things like "Sure, but train ne boat", always write "==" instead of "=" for comparison, and tend to write objects with sigils prefixed: "and then $idiot just left", "I'm going to $office".

But then, /me misses IRC commands (most importantly "/ignore") IRL, so YM probably V.

Regarding your second point, over here in the UK there is a chain of betting shops known as Ladbrokes, the signs on the front of their shops look like this:

/Ladbrokes/

The first time I saw this I thought "Hmmm, why don't they just write it in italice?". When I was enlightened I realised it was a not-very useful regular expression.

I've heard a few people make similar comments about that sign!

Last week, when helping my daughter get started on her math homework, I very nearly said "Remember to use strict;". (It'd been a loooong day.)

At least it's not as bad as when I worked for a phone company. They use Universal Service Order Codes, or USOCs, as shorthands for everything. For example, to this day, nearly a decade later, I know that NSD means "Caller ID". When you spend your whole day dealing with NSD/NMP/N8D/and so one, you see USOCs all over the place.

What's really bad is that I'm now working for a company in the medical/pharmaceutical market, and I still see USOCs! Except I have to remember that NDC is now "National Drug Code", not "Caller ID". Slight difference.

That depends on who you ask I guess. All life contains DNA (Deoxyribonucleic acid) which many consider to be the code which builds the object living thing, kind of like a TK script and your birth (or fertilization) is the &MainLoop call.



-Kevin

my $a='62696c6c77667269656e6440676d61696c2e636f6d';
while ($a=~m/(^.{2})/s)
{print unpack('A',pack('H*',"$1"));$a=~s/^.{2}//s;}
[download]

All life contains DNA (Deoxyribonucleic acid) ...


except:
Prions (only protien)
retro-viruses (RNA)
there are many more .. but i cant recall them at the moment!
Hmm... i think ill take my pedantic hat off now...



Im so sick of my Signature...

Often times when I'm knee deep in a project I will have recursive nightmares in Perl. The kind of dream where you just can't seem to solve a problem, wake up, and then as soon as you're asleep, bang - right back in to the nightmare.

That's a recurring nightmare. Now, if you'd been dreaming about dreaming about not being able to solve a problem...

I don't know that I've gone quite that far. I've dreamed that I was dreaming before, but... :)
Useless trivia: In the 2004 Las Vegas phone book there are approximately 28 pages of ads for massage, but almost 200 for lawyers.

I do dream about Perl, and normally come up with fantastic solutions to my real life problems in the dream, only to wake up and find that I can't remember them!

The other day my friend was talking about a "pearl strings" (ie pearl necklaces) and I immediately thought of "perl strings". Clearly evidence that work should give me a week off before the psychologic damage becomes irreversible ;)

Thanks for posting that reference to Jeff Hawkins book, it might be a handy reference for what I'm currently working on. I don't know how 'new' his theory is though - from the write up he seems to be elaborating on ideas that are not uncommon in cognitive modelling.

If you want to see the other side of the argument, try Jerry Fodors 'The mind doesn't work that way: the scope and limits of computational psychology'.

I quite agree about the value of studying science, as a way of developing logical approaches to problems. But I would say that there is value in learning any discipline (or ideally as many as possible - learn everything!). Studying history, particularly the Enlightenment period, gave me a useful insight into the origins of many of the concepts of science that we now take for granted, and the different approach to research provided a different, additional set of tools to use when approaching a problem.

Now, off to Amazon in search of that book.

VGhpcyBtZXNzYWdlIGludGVudGlvbmFsbHkgcG9pbnRsZXNz

My ex-husband used to actually say 'CTRL-U' in conversation.

next;

use strict;
my @answer = qw(Not so much perl as perlmonks - I recently tried to ++
+ an article on the register. Doh!);
foreach (@answer){print "$_ ";}
print "\n";
[download]

#!/usr/bin/perl
use strict;
use warnings;
use less 'java';
print <DATA>;
__DATA__
You forgot your she-bang and -w


--
Linux, sci-fi, and Nat Torkington, all at Penguicon 3.0
perl -e 'print(map(chr,(0x4a,0x41,0x50,0x48,0xa)))'

Last friday my brain was trying to trick me into sleeping through the alarm... I kept looking over at the time and then applying regexes to it so it would say what I wished!

I had been having perl dreams all night before that too.