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GENTLE_ART_OF_PROGRAMMING

                                                          April 6, 2007
   "Larry has turned what was
    a gentleman's war into
    guerilla tactics. He
    consistently and cleverly
    (I never said he wasn't                 BLADES_OF_PERL
    brilliant) slanders other
    languages and language
    communities, and
    encourages this behavior          [ref]
    in his lieutenants."
        -- Steve Yegge

Where does Steve Yegge get the notion that
there's *any* sort of "gentleman's agreement"
about pissing on the other guy's language?

When I got started in
this game, "structured
programming" was going
to save the world, and
Edsger Dijkstra was         Perhaps, like most
making pronouncements       "gentlemen's"
about how a generation      rules, it's only         From wikiquotes:
of programmers had had      intended to protect
their brains                you if you're a          "... the teaching of
irreparably damaged by      member of the club.      BASIC should be rated
programming in "Basic".                              as a criminal offence:
                                                     it mutilates the mind
   The word in those days is                         beyond recovery."
   we were supposed to give up
   on *ugly* languages like                          Edsger W. Dijkstra,
   Fortran and switch to Pascal.                     "The threats to computing
                                                     science", [ref]
   Imagine my surprise that
   Pascal was one of the worse
   languages ever invented.       Pascal liked to
                                  pretend that there      Pascal used the first
                                  was no outside world:   byte of a string to
   I've long since gotten         input and output had    store the length of
   over the notion that           to be handled by non-   the string: Strings
   there's some sort of           standard extensions.    that max out at 255
   magic syntax out there         Doing anything useful   characters.
   that will allow bug free,      (e.g. renaming a
   easily maintainable code       file) required using       Useful, that.
   to flow from my                OS calls directly.
   fingertips like bullshit
   from the white house.              In contrast,
                                      perl was
                                      designed to
                                      give you
                                      full access
                                      to the unix
                                      underneath,
                                      faking a unix
                                      when there
                                      wasn't one
                                      there.



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