This article gives a great background to Ruby's syntax origins in perl. Also, with a series of "What happened to perl?" articles appearing lately (maybe just one on HN) it gives a nice retrospective on both good parts and quirks of the language. That perl was eagerly adopted in many toolchains vital to linux distributions (such as Gnu autotools) and is a deep dependency through the IT world today is a testament to the strong fundamentals of the language beyond the oft-flamed syntax pecadilos.
To my thinking, the tides of perl bashing in articles and comments is a sign of the vitality of the language (all publicity is good publicity) especially with the continued development and renaissance of the language -- new language features such as in-core OO, mature tools such as the Perl Data Language -- along with cultural commitment to on-boarding and mentoring in the perl community.
The war on drugs and millions of non-violent offenders in prison does not exactly suggest to me the term "sacrosanct."
Every honest therapist looks at all components of a patient's life, and the patient, too, has a responsibility to identify what is helping and what is hurting them, or in which situations a trade-off is justified.
We will never be able to arrive at a complete and perfect answer for everyone because people happen to be individuals. However the medical profession (including therapy professions) lean heavily on generalizations to avoid the overhead of having to deal with a living, breathing individual with a history and family context, where possible.
Kurt Vonnegut wrote that an aspiring writer should take any writing job he or she can get. A hack job will at least keep the creative wheels turning. I think the same applies to software development jobs. Take one where you can learn something, hone your chops. Doesn't have to be your passion, because turning an abstract conception into working software is intrinsically satisfying to someone who appreciates that particular form of magic.
Do your own projects on the side and keep your antenna peeled for other opportunities more in line with your own life goals.
Yeah, it's a great idea. If nothing else, taking a job that is non-ideal will expose you to real people with real problem, even if the domain you all are working on is boring/sucky/whatever. Notice when people complain about stuff, try to see the patterns, ask probing questions what could have helped them, and eventually you'll discover patterns of problems that you could potentially solve by leaving and building your own thing.
Reacting to the headline, I understand the basic concept of medicine is you treat a patient who presents with a condition, not a condition in isolation like some kind of abstract math problem. I think it's a mistake when doctors say to each other, even as a shorthand, I have a gallbladder to deal with, when it's a real person, and the best results come from considering the whole person when pondering how to care for them and which treatments to administer, with the medicine being only a part.
You are speaking commendably from the point of view of diagnostics but from the point of view of physical operation you absolutely need that specialisation.
It is perfectly reasonable for the doctor to have "a gallbladder" to deal with--there are few failure modes and a standardized response to them. In specialized fields you will find professionals describe situations in terms of a baseline and any deviations from said baseline--just about completely unintelligible to anyone who doesn't know those baselines. To describe a patient as "a gallbladder" is saying it's a standard presentation of the problem. And doctors are not supposed to identify patients if not necessary.
If I had my 'druthers, all percentages would be replaced by multiplication factors. I would especially eradicate percentages combined with modifiers like "more", "less", "grows by", etc., which easily leads to awkward or impossibly ambiguous statements.
In other words, kids won't learn "150% more" but instead "2.5x". Nothing will be described as "shrinks by 30%", it'll just be 0.70x.
While advertisers/marketers may love percentages for tricking people with a Big Happy Number, mathematically they are extra work at best, and sometimes they just ruin everything like this "100% finer" nonsense."
I've been there since the DOS days when it was all dark mode, green phosphor characters on a black CRT. I was there when amber monitors were the new thing. (I still love sunglasses with brown lenses.) And I watched the early Apple computers with graphics and black-characters-on-white display style that has been the rage ever since... well since the recent new thing being dark mode.
It reminds me of fashion trends, miniskirts then maxis, up and down past the knee like tides.
Not sure how well this dovetails with the research presented in the article, but Grinder and Bandler's work -- which they named Neuro Linguistic Programing (derived I understand from analyzing the brief therapy and hypnotherapy techniques of Milton Erickson) -- postulated that people have dominant modes of thought: visual, auditory, and kinesthetic. They correlated these modes with eye movements they observed in subjects when asked to recall certain events.
In my personal experience, my mind became much less busy as a result of several steps. One being abandoning the theory of mind -- in contrast to spiritual practices such as Zen and forms of Hinduism, where controlling the mind, preventing its misbehavior, or getting rid of it somehow is frequently described as a goal, the mind's activity being to blame for a loss of a person's ability to be present in the here and now.
As a teenager, I can remember trying to plan in advance what I will say to a person when faced with a situation of conflict, or maybe desire toward the opposite sex, doubting that language will reliably sprout from my feelings when facing a person, whose facial reactions (and my dependence on their good will) pulls me out of my mental emotional kinesthetic grounding.
As humans we use language, however, it seems possible to live in our experience. Some people who are alienated from their experience, or overwhelmed by others, seek refuge in language.
There is obviously a gap between research such as this, and how someone can make sense of their agency in life, finding their way forward when confronted with conflict, uncertainty, etc.
To my thinking, the tides of perl bashing in articles and comments is a sign of the vitality of the language (all publicity is good publicity) especially with the continued development and renaissance of the language -- new language features such as in-core OO, mature tools such as the Perl Data Language -- along with cultural commitment to on-boarding and mentoring in the perl community.
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