Re: online store

[mike808@users.sourceforge.net]

> It's really frustrating to be a Perl bigot these days...

You should get a load of the "new" and "interesting" stuff they're excited about
in Java-land.

beanshell - a dynamic run-time compiled/interpreted Java that magically converts
data types and knows what class a variable belongs to.

Didn't Larry Wall invent "bless" and typeglobs with Perl 5 in what? 1994?

And my favorite: attributing a new Java library with the description that it
"makes the easy things simple, and the hard things possible" to someone other
than Larry Wall, as if they (the Java community) were the first ones to ever
utter such astounding praise for a language/tool.

Another: I saw an intro to the new Java Server Faces, and it's
"value-expressions" to reference evaluations of keys to "hash-map" objects.
Check out the syntax: "#{key.name}" and "@{list.name1, list.name2, list.name3}"
to refer to a list of things.

Simply amazing. And these people whined about how terrible Perl syntax was,
looking like modem noise, and how Java syntax is sooooo superior and "cleaner". 

I think they've been sipping the Kopi Lewak a bit too much.

And it's really hard to take these folks seriously when they blather on about
how wonderful and easy it is to solve problems in Java with 200MB of Jar files
and then pooh-pooh Perl because you have to go grab so many modules from CPAN.

I wonder where they got their regular expressions feature from?

And in a "Expert Panel" today, I heard several of them talk about how Java could
 get even better if it adopted an "open source" definition under the control of
the community with one or two leaders. Gee, where have I seen that before?

And then there was the OpenSource naysayers, claiming that by allowing Java to
be "Open Source" they would open the gates to many platform incompatibilities,
and that because they knew that no language with wide platform diversity could
possibly still run code across platforms with no changes, that Sun's stewardship
and control of Java is what "made" Java so cross-platform compatible.

Hello? Perl runs on far, far more diverse platforms than Java does, and the last
time I checked, CPAN wasn't "platform-specific", and never was since it's
inception -- all modules generally install, build, and run from a single set of
code.

Another brilliant "improvement" suggested for Java was that the "Standard" Java
libraries could be broken out into individual projects that could grow, advance,
or whither and go away over time, in a big, widely distributed repository with
lots of people committing to. Yawn. For a minute there I thought they believed
they actually "discovered" what CPAN is.

I am amazed, and yet not by the Java community having grown so inbred, it cannot
conceive of technological advancement beyond or outside of their own language,
much less give credit to the pioneers whose non-Java work is remade in the image
of Java and worshipped as "innovation". Gaaak. I'm relieved I didn't puke on the
spot.

That said, I did hear one good quote:

I'd rather stab myself in the eye than work on one more "web-based" application.

Then they proceeded to talk about "rich client experience", which reached
consensus that this means taking another stab at deploying applets.

As opposed to something cool like Flash Remoting in Perl
(http://simonf.com/flap/ -- check out the Petmarket implementation!) and Simon
Wistow's http://thegestalt.org/flash/ modules for generating Flash objects on
the fly. You know, leveraging something that Perl is not particularly good at
(rich user interface) instead of re-inventing the wheel because you suffer from
NIH syndrome.

Oh, well. Hearing about Tapestry (Erik Hatcher) and Pragmatic CVS (Dave Thomas)
from the canonical sources was worth the suffering.

Mike/

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