June 03, 2004
Periodically perl
My friends have scared me with their unabashed love for LaTeX.
I do not write my dissertation in LaTeX. That's because I like WYSIWYG, and dislike the idea that a minor code being confused on page three of a document may cause page fifteen to look wrong. And because I dislike compiling my documents. Or getting compiler errors.
Which makes me think of my various other computer scientist heresies.
But the question of "what about scripts" is always a curiously pressing one. Somehow, I always find myself with vast quantities of data that need clever find-and-replace, small fixes, or a refactoring. Which is why one usually uses Perl, a computer language that seems to inspire phrases like bletcherous hack.
With no further ado, then, I'll suggest you check out Mark Lentczner's Periodic Table of Operators to get an idea of just how weird Perl really is.
