DHA and Computers

• Perl - The programming language of choice for cool people. Lets face it, C doesn't make sense half the time (you have to love it when the books on a language tell you things along the lines of "You should be able to do this this way, but it doesn't work, so do it this more complicated way". I suppose if you're going to work in C, you have to live with this, but I do not feel required to like it.), Java is 70-95% hype. Perl just works, darn it. Well, a lot of the time, anyway. One of the biggest advantages of perl is that it was designed by a linguist, so it actually makes some kind of sense to humans (even though you can certainly make it look like line noise if you want to). Basically, Perl Rules.

• Beyond being a fan of the language itself, I am a charter member (and current ruthless, godless dictator) of the New York Perl Mongers, a member of the larger Perl Mongers organization. What we have is a user group for perl here in NYC... which rarely discusses perl. Well, ok, we do discuss perl, but we also make the most of the social aspects when we can. We welcome appearances by visiting perl dignitaries (primarily the ever-popular Randal L. Schwartz). Come on down.

  I've also written a ny.pm oriented JAPH. Feel free to try it out (from a command line on a system with Perl installed, anyway):

  perl -e '$_ = (join "", (map (chr, (shift =~ /.../g))));print "$_\n";' 106117115116032097032110121032112101114108032104097099107101114

  Unsurprisingly, brian d foy, founder of Perl Mongers has come up with a (slightly) faster version, albeit perhaps less unobvious (YMMV):

  perl -e 'print +(join "", (map (chr, (shift =~ /.../g)))), "\n";' 106117115116032097032110121032112101114108032104097099107101114

  And here's another little non-geographically oriented one:

  perl -e 'print "Just another P$0-r-l hacker"'

• HTML - Well, this page is here isn't it?

• Hardware - Macintoshes are cool. Don't argue. They're not all things to all people, but they are cool. If you like 'em, use 'em - don't let other people talk you into something you'll wind up really hating. Note: this is, naturally directed primarily at users, rather than programmers - I spend a lot of time, doing unixesque stuff as well (heck, I've even got Linux installed on my mac), so this is just a call for using the best tool for the job. OK? (this is turning into disclaimer city, isn't it?).