Success is getting what you want, happiness is wanting what you get.– Bertrand Russell

Drunken Stevey writes about Perl as an ancient language, in his long rambling style. He agrees with my belief that developers should take a compilers course:

The disease, nay, the virus of programming-language religion has a simple cure: you just write a compiler. Or an interpreter. One for any language other than the one you know best. It’s as easy as that. After you write a compiler (which, to be sure, is a nontrivial task, but if there’s some valid program out there that you couldn’t ever write, then you’re not justified in calling yourself a programmer), the disease simply vanishes. In fact, for weeks afterwards, you can’t look at your code without seeing right through it, with exactly the same sensation you get when you stare long enough at a random-dot stereogram: you see your code unfold into a beautiful parse tree, with scopes winding like vines through its branches, the leaves flowering into assembly language or bytecode.

Ryan Tomayko writes about a new Git hosting service. It hooks into Lighthouse and Campfire, and looks web2.0-ish too.¹

1. Not that web2.0-ish means much, but that style of site is really easy to grok ↩

Do not learn Perl, or you will miss it from every other language you use.

A good explanation of a site meltdown (using Django), and how the authors plan to avoid repeating it.

Should array indices start at 0 or 1? My compromise of 0.5 was rejected without, I thought, proper consideration. -Stan Kelly-Bootle

Dean Edwards has released a new version of his magic make-IE-suck-less script, which brings IE within reach of standards.

Git is the next Unix, a developer’s perspective on how Git revolutionizes file systems.

Jakob Nielsen’s Top-10 Application-Design Mistakes. Read it.

Another HTML to PDF conversion tool, this one is written in Python and is licensed under the QT license.