Fraize Dotcom

It’s iPhone day, and geeks all over the USA are standing in line, as I type, in front of their Apple stores and AT&T stores. I was very nearly one of them, until I had a come-to-jesus moment with my cellphone buying habits – you see, I tend to go through a lot of them.

Plus, there’s this ridiculous frenzy going on regarding this thing – perhaps you’ve noticed it? Yes, the features of the phone are sexy and cool, but really, will this thing improve your life significantly?

This little funny video sums up the hysteria nicely. Have a great iPhone Day!

sitting inside at the stadium, at the dc united game. one of thinkgeek’ s vendors has a sky suite which means free beer!

I spent this weekend playing games and visiting with Heather’s family. It’s Heather’s niece’s 1st birthday, so we congregated at Heather’s sister’s house for BBQ and cake. Good times, but Heather’s mom didn’t make it up from Florida. Sunday, though, we were able to hook up with them for Father’s day festivities which were held at Logans in Fairfax. More BBQ!!

I picked up Lost Planet again, after letting it collect dust for a while. I got past the boss level I got stuck in last time, and had a lot more fun with it this time. Unfortunately, I got some serious geriatric sega-thumb going on. The geriatric variety makes my arthritis flare up instead of giving me the blister. New age-bracket means new gaming injuries. Joy.

Having written software for 9 years (with a year off), I’ve seen many different styles and philosophies of writing code. I learned from a lot of very very smart people what makes good code and what makes bad code. Steve McConnell is one of the people I look up to with regards to writing readable high-quality code. His, and my, general philosophy is – the best code is clean, highly readable, well commented, and highly generic. At Dell, this philosophy was drilled into me every day. Our code had to be understood by anyone of any skill level. Our variables had to be meaningful. We were generally trained that code could be verbose if it made it more easily readable, because more readable code was easier to debug.

At ThinkGeek, I’m trying to pitch in to help our programmers and support guys, which means learning how to code in Perl. The philosophy behind writing code in Perl is almost diametrically opposite to the philosophy to which I am familiar. Perl is arcane to the extreme, and uses syntax and operators that are confusing and counterintuitive. Anyone who has programmed with Regular Expressions knows this is true.

What’s more, the philosophy, as described by guru Randal L. Schwartz, is basically that an economy of code is easier to write and read because fewer words take less time to read and write. Many of Perls intrinsics have default operations, so often you can just invoke an object, and the default operation gets executed – again, resulting in very small amounts of code, but requiring the person reading or writing the code have intimate knowledge of those operations. Languages like Java, Visual Basic and C# don’t have those kinds of defaults, so, again, code becomes way more readable by anyone.

Many Perl programmers call it, “The One True Language.” Honestly, I think Perl programmers are scamming people. The expertise necessary to successfully write in Perl shakes out those who are unable to memorize by rote Perl’s complexity, creating a certain elite cadre of coders.

Still, this is my first impression. Maybe I’ll see the value in coding Perl later. I fully believe that it is a very powerful language, but I have yet to see why anyone would want to code in Perl versus anything else. I will have to keep an open mind.