Larry Wall on Perl 6

Larry Wall on Perl 6: "Terrorists caused book sales to plunge
(Score:5, Funny)
by digitaldc (879047) * Alter Relationship on Tuesday December 20, @08:04AM (#14298134)
O'Reilly had run into really tough times because of the plunge in book sales, which was already starting before 9/11 but very much accelerated at that point.

I remember on 9/11 thinking: That's it, I will never buy any more books! The terrorists have won."
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Re:Grammatical mutability...
(Score:5, Insightful)
by code65536 (302481) Alter Relationship on Tuesday December 20, @08:43AM (#14298371)
(Last Journal: Friday February 15, @05:01AM)
Ahem! There is a difference between syntactical messiness and semantic messiness. Perl is very ugly syntactically, but I've found it so very beautiful semantically, and its fluidity is exactly what makes Perl so perfect: it allows the fusion of functional (e.g., Lisp-like), imperative (e.g., C-like), and OO paradigms of programming. While many languages fuse the latter two (like C++), few are able to successfully fuse in the first (with things like functions being first-class expressions and something similar to an equivalence of statements and expressions) (and no, just because Python has "lambda" doesn't make it more Lisp-like in the broad picture--in fact, they are even thinking about retreating from that--grrr).

If someone feels that using the full scope of Perl results in messiness, they aren't forced by any means to use that full scope. There are many Perl coders who limit themselves to the "C subset" of Perl. But unlike certain other unnamed languages, Perl doesn't try to play the role of parent in telling you what you can and can't express so those who are more comfortable with a wider breadth of linguistic forms can take advantage of that and make code that is, in a word, elegant.

As for the syntactical ugliness (the $, @, %, etc.) that most people are referring to when they say that Perl is ugly... well, you learn to live with that pretty early on. But beneath that superficial ugliness lies a sparkling beautiful language.
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http://tryruby.hobix.com/

The Perl 6 VM is Parrot

(Score:5, Informative)

by YA_Python_dev (885173) on Tuesday December 20, @07:49AM (#14298055)

The virtual machine that will run Perl 6 [perl.org] is Parrot [parrotcode.org], an innovative register-based JITed VM optimized for dynamic languages.
It can also run a subset of Python (compiled with Pirate [tangentcode.com]), Ruby, Tcl, brainf*ck, Ook!, Common LISP, BASIC, Lua, m4 and a few others, all of which are more or less incomplete.

More details on the Parrot site [parrotcode.org] and the Wikipedia page on the Parrot VM. [wikipedia.org]

If you like that sort of things, you can help! [parrotcode.org]

XOXOXOXOXOXOXOXOXOXOXOXOXOXOXOXOXOXOXOXOXOXOXOXOXOXOXOX
http://www.newnova.org/list_news.html

Re:So, to sum it up

(Score:5, Insightful)

by Motherfocking Sheet (636021) on Tuesday December 20, @01:10AM (#14297013)
(http://shaunc.com/ | Last Journal: Saturday June 18, @12:47AM)

You have an interesting definition of "nothing happened." To me, it sounded more like:

Police raid ISP
Police confiscate servers
Police visit Suprnova operator at home
Police seize two computers and various media from Suprnova operator
Suprnova spends a few months in limbo
Suprnova stresses out over mail from prosecutor
Case dropped
Suprnova still gone

I'd be interested in a translation of the letter that he posted on the site. Specifically, I'm interested in knowing why exactly the prosecutors decided not to pursue the case.

--
Memphis Area Slashdotters Unite! [mymidsouth.com]

[ Reply to This | Parent ]

Re:So, to sum it up

(Score:5, Insightful)

by slavemowgli (585321) on Tuesday December 20, @01:27AM (#14297038)
(http://venganza.org/)

Without knowing the details of Slovenian copyright law, I'd guess that it was dropped because he didn't actually do anything wrong. No copyrighted data went through the suprnova servers, and copyright infringement is not a criminal offense in most countries, so it's likely that contributing to it is not illegal at all, either (it typically only is for criminal activities).

In other words, it's the same reason why ThePirateBay still operates - only that the latter is hosted in Sweden, where it's probably (I assume!) less easy for the music/movie industry to get the police to investigate things when there is no evidence of an actual crime being committed.

--
quidquid latine dictum sit altum videtur.
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sites come and go

(Score:5, Insightful)

by beast6228 (472737) on Tuesday December 20, @02:28AM (#14297165)
(http://www.legendnet.net/)

Suprnova may have been popular at the time, but like all websites, they come and go. There is always someone else to take their place. Remember isonews.com when it was taken down by the FBI years ago? Hey guess what? Their back up and running with a new website theisonews.com

Now we have sites like thepiratebay.org which is probably one of the best torrent sites on the internet. Heck, they even tout the lawyers and post the threating legal letters on their website for everyone to read http://thepiratebay.org/legal.php [thepiratebay.org]
Quite hilarious if you ask me.
Of course you have other torrent sites as well, like torrentspy.com which is another popular site.

sites come and go, they come and go....
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Re:"wait and see" ?

(Score:5, Interesting)

by hot soldering iron (800102) on Tuesday December 20, @07:08AM (#14297869)

Are you an American? Then get a clue. According to the Patriot Act that our "representatives" *PTOOEY!* signed into law, all they have to do is say "Homeland Security", and you can be held INDEFINITELY, with NO CHARGES FILED, and NO PUBLIC RECORD, NO REPRESENTATION BY AN ATTORNEY, AND YOUR CONSTITUTIONAL RIGHTS ARE WAIVED!

And that's in a country with a history of being one of the most free and liberal in the world. What do you think normally happens in Slovenia?

How did the land of the free come to resemble Soviet Russia?

--
To people that bash Americans: If you grew up in our society, with our history, with our government, you would be us.
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New Proverb

(Score:5, Interesting)

by carcosa30 (235579) on Tuesday December 20, @03:36AM (#14297340)

Crime is the art of knowing when to quit.

-Me

--
Intolerance for ambiguity is the mark of the authoritarian personality.
==========================

http://slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=05/12/21/1443236

Cross-Site Scripting for Internet Explorer

(Score:5, Interesting)

by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday December 21, @09:48AM (#14309352)

This is reported as a Google.com bug, which is partially true. But this is only one half of the problem. The other half of the problem (mentioned in the full article) is due to a dubious feature in Internet Explorer: when it gets a page without a specified character encoding, it does not rely on default values for the encoding (which should be iso-8859-1 for HTML or UTF-8 for XHTML).

Instead, Internet Exploerer tries to guess the encoding of the contents by looking at the first 4096 bytes of the page and checking the non-ASCII characters. In the case of the cross-site scripting attack decribed here, the problem is that IE would silently set the encoding of a page to UTF-7 in case some characters in the first 4096 bytes looked like UTF-7. This silent conversion to UTF-7 by Internet Explorer in a text that Google assumed to use the default encoding allowed the attackers to bypass the way Google was filtering "dangerous" characters in some URLs.

The article puts the full blame for the vulnerability on Google.com. I think that a part of the blame should also be shared by the Internet Explorer designers (and any other browser that does unexpected things while trying to guess what the user "really meant").

--------------------------------

Google vulnerable?

(Score:5, Insightful)

by Anonymous Cowhead (95009) on Wednesday December 21, @10:25AM (#14309698)

It seems odd to blame this on Google. According to the linked mailing list posting, the problem is caused by the "auto detect character set" feature in IE (and probably other browsers,) and the lack of a "charset" parameter in the HTTP response from Google. The HTTP spec is pretty clear that a missing charset parameter means ISO-8859-1, not "browser should guess", and certainly not UTF-7.

So isn't it really the "auto detect" feature in the browser that causes the vulnerability, and not Google's lack of "charset encoding enforcement" as the mailing list posting from Watchfire Research claims? Let's put the blame where it belongs. I say we should applaud Google for going the extra kilometer to protect users with non-compliant browsers.
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Re:How do they find these things . . . legally?

(Score:5, Informative)

by slashkitty (21637) on Wednesday December 21, @10:30AM (#14309745)
(http://slashdot.org/dev/null)

Well, with XSS, you don't have to "break into" anything to discover the vulnerability. All you do is throw the webservers a few strings and see what they send back.

I've found dozens of XSS problems on sites, and have made news for one on Citibank. I've only received a few threatening legal letters from companies.

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Parrot virtual machine

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia.

Jump to: navigation, search

Parrot is a register-based virtual machine being developed using the C programming language and intended to run dynamic languages efficiently. It uses just-in-time compilation for speed to reduce the interpretation overhead. It is currently possible to compile Parrot assembly language and PIR (an intermediate language) to Parrot bytecode and execute it.

Parrot was started by the Perl community, and is developed with help from the open source and free software communities. As a result, it is focused on license compatibility (Artistic License and GNU GPL), platform compatibility (Unix, Microsoft Windows, Mac OS X and Classic, VMS, Crays, Windows CE, Palm OS, and others), processor architectures compatibility (x86, SPARC, DEC Alpha, IA-64, ARM, Palms, old Macs), speed of execution, small size (around 700k depending on platform), and being flexible enough to handle the varying demands of Perl, Python, Tcl, Ruby, Scheme, and other dynamic languages. It is also focusing on improving introspection, debugger capabilities, and compile-time semantic modulation.

Contents 1 Static and dynamic languages 2 License 3 History 4 Internals 5 Examples 5.1 Registers 5.2 Arithmetic operations 6 Culture 7 See also 8 External links

[edit]

Static and dynamic languages

The differing properties of statically and dynamically typed languages have motivated the design of Parrot. Current popular virtual machines such as the Java virtual machine and the Common Language Runtime have been designed for statically typed languages, while the languages targeted by Parrot are dynamically typed.

Virtual machines like the Java virtual machine and the current Perl 5 virtual machine are also stack based. The developers see it as an advantage of the Parrot machine that it has registers, and therefore more closely resembles an actual hardware design, allowing the vast literature on compiler optimization to be used generating code for the Parrot virtual machine so that it will run bytecode at speeds closer to compiled languages like C.

Besides a subset of the planned Perl 6, an increasing number of languages can be compiled to Parrot assembly language including BASIC, Befunge, Brainfuck, Cola, Forth, Jako, Lisp, m4, Miniperl, Ook!, Parakeet, OpenComal, PHP, Plot, Punie, Python, Ruby, Scheme, Span, Tcl, URM, and YAL. Most of these other language implementations are currently still incomplete and experimental.

There is strong interest in parts of the Ruby community. The Python community is taking more of a wait-and-see attitude, due to already having Psyco, a just-in-time Python-to-machine-code compiler, Jython, a Python-to-Java-bytecode compiler, and IronPython to compile to the .NET platform, as well the in-development PyPy, a rewrite of Python in Python itself aimed to provide static code generation as well as high-level optimization.

[edit]

License

Parrot is a free software project, distributed under the same terms as Perl; that is, dual-licensed under both the GNU General Public License and the Artistic License.

[edit]

History

The project started to implement Perl 6 and originally had the very dull name "The software we're writing to run Perl 6". The name Parrot came from an April Fool's joke in which a hypothetical language named Parrot was announced that would unify Python and Perl [1]. The name was later adopted by this project, whose intent includes the unification of Perl and Python. Several tiny languages are being developed along with it which target the Parrot virtual machine.

• First source code released to the world September 10, 2001.

The Age of Stealth and Existential Cannibalism

The Age of Stealth and Existential Cannibalism: "Kevin P. McElroy - 08:35pm May 27, 2005 EDT (#88 of 88)

If Bush is 'incoherent and irrational', it is only becuase he accurately reflects American culture which is quickly becoming 'incoherent and irrational' at its heart. How can we not be, when we believe ourselves to be Gods' gift to liberty, yet we now find ourselves economically forced to become a police state? America is facing its worst cultural shock since WWII or that missile crisis. The land of endless indulgence suddenly wakes up to no more jobs, no healthcare, and a system custom-made to encourage successful terrorism. Yes, we are in shock and Bush reflects us perfectly. Our motto by necessity is now 'Liberty Through Repression', hence our understandably irrational schizophrenia. Just as Clinton reflected our sense of shallow, self-absorbed indulgence and entitlement. "

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http://forum.theatlantic.com/WebX?50@217.C5FeaKfMmkc.1@.4a826849
Economically and internationally, I agree with Bush/Rush Limbaugh about 10% of the time, and I can respect them at those times, even though 90% of the time I find them ill-informed (or dishonest) blowhards with no understanding of what our outsourcing-friendly economic policy means to the jobs of the middle-class, who carry the economy of America on our backs. (Duh! People on Unemployment do not pay the same kinds of taxes of people who work!)

I agree with the economic principles of Democrats about 90% of the time although I am aghast at their abandonment of their historic principles to protect the weak and powerless by adopting an anti-life platform that puts my tax dollars to use killing innocent children.
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http://forum.theatlantic.com/WebX?50@217.C5FeaKfMmkc.1@.4a826bc8
To illustrate this point we might juxtapose the European Pope (who suggested, as Dr. Bloom writes, that we think of heaven as "a state of being in relation to God" rather than a physical place) and our American President ("I don't do nuance.") Now, it's fashionable in liberal circles to think the President doesn't do nuance because he's an ignorant slob, but that's really not the point. The point is he doesn't do nuance because it's not in his best interest. It would stymie his ability to make strong choices, to live his life as he wants to live it and take action in a way consistent with his self-image. This is a very clear and striking exception to Steven Pinker's (paraphrased) observation that "we typically don't get solace from propositions we don't already believe to be true." In matters metaphysical, "truth" is not apparent in the same way that food or no food is apparent to a hungry person. And let's not even get started on sexual desire's ability to let us "believe what we want to."
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Kevin P. McElroy - 09:56pm Nov 13, 2005 EDT (#10 of 54)

Science and religion do get semantically involved with each other at times. If God exists, then is this not a physical fact of reality that science would be prudent to accept as part of the whole data, rather than reject out of a purely emotional prejudice? Likewise is not religion obligated to accept the observable facts of physical universe, such as certain elements of evolution? Evolution in no way indicates that God does not exist, only that His medium of creation is partly through the finite, limited forms of physical matter.

If miracles also exist, then science is only prudent to take them as part of the whole of natural data. Today's "spiritual" or occult knowledge can often become tomorrow's science. It only benefits science to keep an open mind toward non-physical realities, and it is healthy for religion to encounter and interpret new physical data. The weakness of both sides is to wish to have monolithic authority over reality, which is really an act of hubristic pride, not honest science or religion.
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pdan - 07:18am Nov 15, 2005 EDT (#13 of 54)

Not to disparage any religion...

While Budhism is fine as a philosophy, I would not be too fast to discard some features of other religions.

Monotheism carries with it the concept of brotherhood, equality, social justice and compassion. It also carries with it the righteous indignation when our concept of justice, including social justice, is not met. It rejects suffering as a necessary condition of existence and challenges us to craft a better world.

All religions and philosophies are open to corruption and exploitation by those driven by gried and thirst for power over others. In the past, passivity in some religions and philosophies has been exploited by autocrats. The righteeous indignation in other religions allowed for revolutionaries to sow mayhem and impose a similar autocratic rule.

No religion, as far as I know, truely advocates the abridgement of civil liberties by the state.
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eclat - 12:42am Nov 16, 2005 EDT (#20 of 54)

In Response to Peter

Peter's take, that as we evolve as a species, our need for God will diminish, is a mainstay argument among atheists. The curious thing about this idea is its buried assumption: that we are in fact evolving as a species. Having just finished a century where more wars were fought than in all previous centuries of recorded history combined, it certainly begs the question of what they mean by "evolved." I don't see us getting any better as a species at all. While it appears we make gains in some areas (the treatment of women, the abolition of slavery, advances in technology), we regress in others (our destruction of the environment, the rise of ethnic cleansing, child slave labor, etc).

C.S. Lewis once characterized the idea that we're improving as a species as "chronological snobbery," which is the assumption that we know better than our ancestors just because we happen to be walking about. He considered it the height of naivete and hubris. So do I. But I'm sure Peter is a very nice guy.
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leoemyers - 04:52pm Nov 23, 2005 EDT (#38 of 54)

Oh My!

Well actually when it comes to western religions, I will agree that they are in general pathological expressions of this dichotomy of the brain(s).

The whole notion of committing on day 1 to a confirming believe that God was born by a Virgin, died and was resurrected with a presumably worthless human body, and sits in judgment of my personal behavior, commutes my transgressions by virtue of a sincere belief that he is real and I don't want him mad at me and that I am afraid to burn in some undefined Hell for a very long time, etc... is basically preposterous. We have Fathers without Mothers, Sons without Daughters, and Ghosts all separate but still one. We have a Father God part which was willing to destroy the world because there not enough righteous folks around, but is willing to forgive and indeed promote the sinful creations of his own hands to eternal bliss for believing the Son God part is real in spite of the most brutal murder possible by his fellow humans, and apparently the Ghost God part is needed to keep the righteous folks from altering the Father God part?s inspired words when translated, rewritten, and generally reinterpreted of their true meaning by the oral pronouncements of the righteous followers of the various disciples some of which had no personal contact with Son God part but were persuaded by holy visions. Judaism and Islam are little better.

However the Eastern spiritual views and some western mystical traditions have some possibilities which sort of fit into this mind/soul split. After all, there is the possibility, no matter how small, that the brain dichotomy is actually reflection of a basic reality.

I like the one where the universe that we experience is the manifestation of this self-aware consciousness and through some spiritual practices it is possible to sneak around the limitations placed on our personal portion of the universe and identify with the wholeness which is this universe and of course all that is not this universe, etc. Meditation and other eastern practices do open ones consciousness to other modes of experience which reflects something. What of course is the issue!

I find it of some interest that while I expect most spiritual experiences share a common content, it is the expression of these experiences that differences come about. As Joseph Campbell so carefully stated, the spiritual is beyond language; so by necessity when we speak of the unspeakable we are forced to use the language metaphors of our personal experiences and language. Hence Christians see Jesus and Mary while Hindis see Krishna and Radha.

============================

Here's some recent unofficial commentaries on ID from the RC Church:

Vatican Cardinal: Listen to What Modern Science Has To Offer (Nov.3):

http://www.livescience.com/othernews/ap_051103_vatican.html

Pope Weighs In on Evolution Controversy (Nov.12)(Creation was an "intelligent project", not purposeless or directionless):

http://www.livescience.com/othernews/ap_051112_pope_evolution.html

Vatican Astronomer: Intelligent Design Is Not Science (Nov.18):

http://www.livescience.com/othernews/ap_051118_ID_vatican.html
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pdan - 01:09pm Nov 26, 2005 EDT (#45 of 54)

The Revelations

.../... .../...

“…God saw that the light was good…God called the dry land Earth, and the gathering of waters He called Seas. And God saw that this was good… “

Was God (according to these Revelations) just experimenting ? If He were so smart would He not have known that it would be good before he created it ? You can see the answer to this in many ways, but to me it makes sense in only one way. The purpose of the Revelations is to infuse morality into the world. In a world where people were worshipping fire, earth and winds the Revelations pose the proposal that all these are the creations of one source. More than that, in a world where people were fearing and worshipping angels, demons, monsters, good as well as evil, and indifferent deities, the Revelations pose the proposal that not only are all the creations from one source, but that they are all good, none are inherently evil. Most importantly, the creator force is itself good.

When you think about it, it is a powerful message, and a powerful opening to a book of revelations.

While many are stuck on memorizing the literal interpretation of the Bible, Jews are commanded to study it in every generation. To some this may mean memorizing the literal text, to some this means memorizing literally the interpretations of others. To most, study means a search to understand, and that in turn means to interpret into the language and context of the present age, and into each and every person’s own personal vocabulary.

Hence these people believe that not only is one permitted to interpret, one is in fact commanded to do so.
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