Tag Archives: Perl

Skipping Regexes in ES6 is Nothing Compared to Skipping Boolean-Comparison Warts

Yesterday, Wes Bos tweeted about ES6’s startsWith(), endsWith(), and includes() methods. He said it was “[t]hree less JavaScript Regexes you’ll have to write”. Which is true, but I feel it misses the point. I mean, the regexes for initial match and final match are really not that hard, and the regex for plain inclusion is, well, […]

So Why Isn’t Perl My Favorite Programming Language?

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 […]

Launching SSHblock

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 […]

On Complexity Versus Efficiency

I sometimes imagine how I would teach certain concepts, if I were put in charge of a class. (Not just in programming, either; many people who know me have said I’d make a great teacher; perhaps I’ve taken it to heart.) One of the concepts in programming that I feel has a particularly poor “ease-of-teaching […]