Old tutorial - now corrected

[Tad McClellan]

we are programmers

I see that as a very presumptuous assertion.

 

[Tad McClellan]

if we
see a lot of errors when we first run a new program, do

The objections where not to running a program, they
were to *releasing* the program out into The World.

we scrape the project or do we correct it?

We run it and run it and run it while correcting it,
but we don't *release* it until it is "good enough".

Thats what I
am trying to do.

Your tutorial is not good enough to be released.

Please unrelease it until you get through a few more
debugging cycles.

 

[Tad McClellan]

And "Functional Programming" has a rather specialised meaning.

Not my cup of tea, though.

(I(did(not(like(it(either))))))

 

[axel]

You are not qualified to do what you are doing, please
stop doing it.

No code is *better* than bad code!

OT Chuckle.

Reading Robert Rankins *Knees Up Mother Earth* earlier this week
brought back fond memories of the old ICL 1900 computer series...in
which the Algol/Cobol/Fortran compilers would attempt to produce
some runnable code no matter how many errors were found in the
source.

O tempora, O mores.

Axel

 

[binnyva]

I am beginning to see that this 'conversation' is going
nowhere - you are not understanding what I am saying and
you feel the same about me. I came seeking advice about
my tutoiral, and all I got were complaints about my
scripts.

So I have decided to drop this subject. But none of you
have convinced me to take the tutorial offline. Rather
than pointing out what was wrong with the tutorial and
how to correct it, what you did was claim that I was
unqualified to write it in the first place. And you
did this by judging me by my 2-3 year old scripts.
The scripts available at
http://www.geocities.com/binnyva/code/perl/cgi/
were among the very first perl scripts that I created.
So it is natural that there would be some problems
with them.

Those scripts was not intended for students of perl;
I wrote those scripts years before I wrote this tutorial.
The intended audience for those scripts where people
who had no knowledge of perl(or very little knowledge),
but where looking for the simplest way to setup a
guestbook(or whatever) for their websites - and
unwilling to learn a programming language for that.

My goal in writing the tutorial was to provide a
introduction to perl. I wanted to get the readers
to be interested in perl enought to go to more
advanced tutorials or books. I tried to create
a tutorial that was easy to read and not hard
to understand.

At the same time, in many ways, I had been stubborn
too. I am not able to see the problems with my
tutorial - and my writing it. I still cannot see the
logic in many things pointed out by you gentlemen.

So, I think that it is better for all to quit this
pointless discussion before it degenerates into a
flame war.

If you still think that my tutorial was a waste of
web space and a bad influence for beginners, I am
sorry about the 'mess' I have made. I will still
uphold my promise that I will correct my old scripts.
So far, that is the only good thing that came out
of these postings.

Once again, thank you for not losing your patience,
and sorry for not finding a solution for this problem.
Binny V A
http://www.geocities.com/binnyva/code

 

[A. Sinan Unur]

(e-mail address removed) wrote in

I came seeking advice about my tutoiral, and all I got
were complaints about my scripts.

See http://tinyurl.com/6qe9e for a critique of a section of your
tutorial.

Sinan

 

[Tad McClellan]

But none of you
have convinced me to take the tutorial offline.

Then you are a pox on the Perl community.

I don't like you because you hurt my friends.

Rather
than pointing out what was wrong with the tutorial and
how to correct it,

There was much pointing out of what was wrong with the
tutorial and not much correcting of that which was
pointed out.

what you did was claim that I was
unqualified to write it in the first place.

Because you are.

So it is natural that there would be some problems
with them.

Why do you want to infect others with those problems?

Those scripts was not intended for students of perl;

Then don't point students of Perl to them!

My goal in writing the tutorial was to provide a
introduction to perl.

Our goal is to help our fellow Perl programmers by warning
them off of your tutorial at every opportunity.

I tried to create
a tutorial that was easy to read and not hard
to understand.

Try creating a tutorial that is *correct* for a change.

At the same time, in many ways, I had been stubborn
too.

Amen brother!

 

[Juha Laiho]

(e-mail address removed) said:

Most of the programs there are very old relics - about
two to three years old - I am too lazy to update them.
I should do that - I know. Maybe sometime this year...

Regarding the problem that sparked this thread (date formatting),
that kind of thing was much of the routine crap to correct before
year 2000: there was a lot of code that took the year as returned
by localtime, and concatenated the result with text '19'. This
resulted in years being shown as '19100' when the year turned to
2000, and the problem was widely published, along with the always
correct way to write this (to add a numeric 1900 to the year number
returned from the localtime call). And 2-3 years ago (2002-2003?),
you had managed to have forgotten about the y2k problem to create
year 2010 problem?