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A good long while ago, I tried doing an exercise that I was considering making into a standard job interview question: “For each of your ‘languages of choice’, tell me 5 things you like about the language, and 5 things you dislike about it.” My languages of choice at the time were Perl, PHP, and JavaScript, and my answers quickly showed me why this was not the best interview question:

It was far too easy to come up with dislikes, and not so easy to come up with likes. It was a perfect example of the adage that “Every programming language sucks, but some of them suck more.”

That said, the one language that scored more likes than dislikes, for me, was Perl. Here are some of the things I like about Perl:

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Originally published at Coyote Tracks. You can comment here or there.

kai_mactane: (Default)

My latest software project is now available… where “latest” means “the latest thing I’ve launched, even if I actually wrote it over a year ago.”

The story is simple: I was tired of seeing “failed password” messages from sshd cluttering up my logs. I was also annoyed at the constant flow of dictionary attacks, even if I knew they’d never get in. So I whipped up a quick Perl script that acted as some glue between Swatch and iptables, and which would also give me some amount of reporting and history on who and what it was blocking.

Then I posted about it in my online journal, and a friend said it sounded useful. So I started getting it ready for release as a package that anyone could use…

And promptly realized that doing a decent, professional job of it would take more time than I had available. Fast-forward to now, when I’m unemployed and can only spend so many hours per day job-hunting — the result is that the world gets more software!

Originally published at Coyote Tracks. You can comment here or there.

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July 2011

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