That was a great talk! Notice how his entire career got launched from an internship at Tektronix. I love the bit about how he found his own troff macros in use at O'Reilly because a coworker had taken his code there years before -- and he appreciated that! One might say that the same kind of "80's hacker ethic" is what got him into trouble at Intel.
The Camel book was so well-written. It was my introduction to Perl, which became my "superpower" in the 90's and far longer into the 2000's than I tend to admit. I eventually switched to Python because it's the closest thing that is considered an acceptable "modern" choice. I really enjoy Python too, but the obligatory XKCD about Python[1] rang true for me about Perl first.
For me the #1 superpower strength of both languages is the first-class treatment and syntactic sugar for associative arrays (a.k.a. hashes, dictionaries).
Perl did the same for regexes and file I/O; Python did not.
I have come to appreciate Perl's backwards compatibility -- that old scripts still run unchanged -- though maybe that's largely because Perl 5 has been in maintenance mode for so long.
Thank you for this article. One of the great frustrations of using Magit for Emacs is the inability to read things because the foreground and background colors for various things end up the same on some platforms.
From this article I found the command "toe -a" and was able to try various TERM values until I found one that makes Magit readable: vt100. This turns off colors entirely, which may not be pretty, but at least I can read everything now.
The Camel book was so well-written. It was my introduction to Perl, which became my "superpower" in the 90's and far longer into the 2000's than I tend to admit. I eventually switched to Python because it's the closest thing that is considered an acceptable "modern" choice. I really enjoy Python too, but the obligatory XKCD about Python[1] rang true for me about Perl first.
For me the #1 superpower strength of both languages is the first-class treatment and syntactic sugar for associative arrays (a.k.a. hashes, dictionaries).
Perl did the same for regexes and file I/O; Python did not.
I have come to appreciate Perl's backwards compatibility -- that old scripts still run unchanged -- though maybe that's largely because Perl 5 has been in maintenance mode for so long.
[1] https://imgs.xkcd.com/comics/python.png