Well I can understand why Scotty seems so trendy here. However my vote is for Bones McCoy all the way: too funny with his continuous fights with Mr. Spock! And just not to boldly forget: he's dead Jim!

BTW: ++ for the poll, I was hoping for more Star Trek stuff @ PM. I had begun with some random Klingon programming tips:

I think it's clear enough it's only because of cutural circumstances: most programming languages were born in English speaking countries. I bet Klingon ones are strongly imperative! Klingon geeks despise event driven petaQ: they drive events, not the other way round. And their programs don't have loops. They aim straight to the heart: they often kill and rarely die, but when they do, it's with honour.

Now, I wonder if anyone has ever seen the full Klingon Perl programmer code! (As in "law", not as in "stuff programmers write".)

This makes me wonder what a Klingon distribution of Perl would look like. First, it would probably be called something like Battle Perl.

• Certainly functions like exec, chop, chomp, kill, split would take on new definitions.
• Some functions would probably be renamed, ie seek would become hunt
• Others such as sleep may disappear altogether

As for die it could only have two possible arguments:

die ('without honor');
# exits quietly after deleting its own source code

die ('with honor');
# forcibly terminates process after wreaking havoc with OS and hardwar
+e
[download]

For your enjoyment: var'aq, the Klingon programming language!

~dewey

Time for Inline::Varaq?

var'aq, the Klingon programming language!

Now: http://www.oocities.org/connorbd/varaq/

What about "Damnit Jim, I'm a Doctor, not a Perl programmer." ;)

---

Revolution. Today, 3 O'Clock. Meet behind the monkey bars.

I would love to change the world, but they won't give me the source code

That is gonna end up in my .sig's!

Here you go


TStanley
--------
People sleep peaceably in their beds at night only because rough men stand ready to do violence on their behalf. -- George Orwell

One possibility that nobody seems to have mentioned yet is:

My bat'leth is the best debugging tool.

(Although an entry in the list at the link you pointed me to explicitly ruled out debugging at all.)

I voted for Spock, but only because he got the most out of my favorite character - The Computer.

The voice of Majel Barrett-Roddenberry played the most user-friendly voice activated interface ever conceived.

As a child I was in love with the idea that all of human knowledge could be stored in a machine and that your challenge was how to phrase the right question to find out what you needed to know. Spock was always teasing information out of it by asking questions over and over. I blame this for my lifelong obsession with computers. I never got over it.

(Notice: only in the parallel 'evil' universe was the "ready" prompt used, rather than the traditional "working". What does that say about the universe we live in?)

I'll second your vote for The Computer.
The fact that ELIZA was the state of the art in AI at the time, make the computer even more interesting.
-- gam3
A picture is worth a thousand words, but takes 200K.

The original series is like a wild west movie in space, the storylines, the dialogues, the camera style ... I used to watch it when I was a child, and there is still a little bit left of the fascination I felt in those days, otherwise I would probably not stand to watch it.

One might even say it resembles a sort of Wagon Train to the stars.

It doesn't surprise me that Mr. Scott is the leading choice so far. Who better for a bunch of Perl programmers than the guy who always seems to find a way to do the nearly impossible within nearly impossible deadlines?

There was a ST: Next Gen episode where Scotty guest starred. My favorite exchange was when he berated Gordi for giving a precise estimate.
<Paraphrase>Always pad your estimate, and make your Captain think you're a miracle worker!</paraphrase>.

Sorry, I mis-read your post. For a minunte there I thought you said: "find a way to do the nerdy impossible..."

Ummm... A "Wild West ... in space" would be Firefly, wouldn't it?

I agree; but it was no accident that the Original Series was "like" a western in space. That's exactly how Roddenberry intended it to be.

Look at his prior credits and those of several of his actors:
Roddenberry: "The Virginian" 1 episode, "Have Gun, Will Travel" 23 episodes, "Whiplash", "Wrangler"...
DeForest Kelley: "Death Valley Days", "Laredo", "Bonanza" ...
The same for James Doohan, Leonard Nimoy, and William Shatner.
It looks like most, if not all of them worked on "The Virginian" together.

To me, that's part of its charm: "Wagon Train" in space.

like a wild west movie in space

I always thought of it as "space opera", the classic "good-vs-evil battles". But then again, that is what wild west movies were, "opera for Americans".

---

I'm not really a human, but I play one on earth. Cogito ergo sum a bum

I always thought of it as "space opera", the classic "good-vs-evil battles".

That's the way it looks now. In 1966 it was the first SF series that touched on (for example) computer records being hacked, or race hatred or the problems involved in First Contact situations.

A lot of this is overlooked now because of the less than stellar acting and cheap sets. But when it first ran, it was pure imagination.

I think that the Prime Directive makes Star Trek a bit different than most westerns, where the natives where normally killed.
Also the pilot episode that was latter shown in The Cage. I think you better see Roddenberry's original vision for Star Trek.
-- gam3
A picture is worth a thousand words, but takes 200K.

But, <geek kind="trek">Ilia was in the movies, not in the original TOS series</geek>. {grin}

-- Randal L. Schwartz, Perl hacker

<Geek alert>Ilia was also in the unfilmed Star Trek: Phase II</geek alert>. I have seen some sketchy pre production footage, screen tests and such like.

But, <geek kind="trek">Ilia was in the movies, not in the original TOS series</geek>.

But, <geek kind="smartass">the poll is about "the original Star Trek", and not strictly about TOS, although the expression is ambiguous and left unspecified by the docs. And Ilia was a member of the crew of a starship called Enterprise in some original ST universe.</geek>.

I mean, what are we to believe, that this is a magic xylophone, or something?

Hellooooo, nurse!

Scotty is my second choice, as the engineer's engineer. In reality, way back when I actually watched the show many years ago (no, not the original run, I'm not *that* old!), Spock was my favorite.

Now I'm older I realise that to promote any single part of your personality to the exclusion of any other part is actually a weakness.

Definitely Spock. He had some very classic lines in both the original series and the movies.

Maybe Spock and paco were brothers? nahhh...

Paco and Spock-o? Sure, why not?

--
Nothing to see here. Move along.

Maybe that could explain why he's not been seen around anymore: he probably is where no (other?) man has been before.