Re: Comparing Collections

James Perkins skrev:

No problem. I rather enjoyed it too and that was a great line!

Yeah, he told he on Twitter he didn't hate Java. I've only used Perl a few
times about 8 years ago.
Quote from Twitter:
"I don't *hate* java, I just think it's a huge waste of good resources, like
Windows. :) Better to choose more efficient paths."

Perl is fantastic for processing text - regular expressions are great for picking out stuff from strings - but unfortunately Perl programs have a tendency to grow unreadable rather quickly (unless you exercise strict self control :) Been there, done that.

The major thing that helps immensely for Perl programmers that we do not really have in Java, is subroutines which basically allow you to define a subroutine which can be carried somewhere else and used there. I believe the modern term for that is "closures", but we have something like it in anonymous classes, giving you simple syntax for sort, map and similar.

But, for AS/400 programmers Perl is essentially uninteresting as it does not run easily on AS/400. I have been waiting for a JVM implementation, but after 10 years, I've somewhat given it up :) And "not being able to run" is not very efficient!

Prompted by the Paul Graham story about Lisp I've grown curious and found that actually Lisp is crystalized computer science theory (which just by accident got turned into practice). Clojure is a Scheme (which is Lisp disguised) running on the JVM. I'vegot on my TODO-list to see if it might be beneficial to us, or it is for more advanced stuff than just moving data off the AS/400 and on a web page?

Anybody else looking into this?

Looks like Paul Graham has a bunch of essays, I'll have to start to read
some of them.

It amazes me how many "high-profile" (term used loosely :)) programmers
there are here in Oregon. Kent Beck is in southern Oregon, Randal Shwartz
and Linus Torvalds here in Portland and Joshua Marinacci (Sun JavaFX guru)
in the Eugene area.