50 greatest workstation setups

[itlnstln]

Soda cans give it away; she must be Sandra Bullock in that old hacker film. I always wondered how she maintained her figure eating the pizza and fast-food **** she's portrayed eating.

Bulimia.

[ironcoder]

you mean obscure not opaque?  Perl is pretty straightforward since it is rather new but APL is definitely not reader friendly.

I don't know, I've seen some Perl obfuscations that look pretty opaque to me. Never coded it myself, so I'm sure that doesn't help but man! It seems to lend itself to being used by guys who pride themselves on job security or terseness or both.

I coded APL in the old days and it's something you really have to stay on top of. It's easy to lose track in your own code, something I don't think I've ever done in any other language. Come back to even good code you wrote a while ago, forget it!

[itlnstln]

I have written some very long queries in SQL before that have nearly gotten me lost, but careful commenting (who the hell does that, anyway?) and structure keeps things sane.  Really, though, I could write more simple queries using volitile tables, but where's the fun in that?

[ironcoder]

The worst SQL you can ever write will be more readable than the average Perl script

[itlnstln]

Agreed.  I have a Perl script scheduled in CRON to change a filename when it finds its target file.  Even that looks pretty unreadable for how simple it is.  I am no programmer, to be sure, but when I was first told to start building web-based reports/apps, I had a choice to use C# or VB.NET (yes, I had to use MS stuff).  I, ultimately, went with VB even though it is more verbose since it was easier to read and follow for a non-programmer.