Programmer Humor

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A week of fprintfs has me wanting to code rust next week (lemmy.ml)

submitted 9 months ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

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[–] MajorHavoc 23 points 9 months ago (1 children)

These are excellent.

I need to add Perl.

Perl is a honey bee. You are unassuming and pragmatic. You fill every niche. Your buzzing carries meaning, but only to other bees. In theory, your ecosystem niche is filled by many competing solutions that are more fit to purpose. But somehow we all know in our hearts that if you disappear, all life on the planet will probably die soon after.

[–] [email protected] 16 points 9 months ago (1 children)

May I acquaint you with the Evil Mangler, historically used by GHC to compile Haskell via C. It would go through the assembly gcc generates and rearrange whole blocks and deletes instructions, such as function prologues and epilogues.

[–] [email protected] 9 points 9 months ago (1 children)

Holy shit. This thing sounds insanely awesome, but also quintessentially Perl. Like, the perfect holotype for Perl.

And, damn, but I'm impressed. I've seen code that I admired; elegant, inspired, wise code... but the Evil Mangler leaves me in awe.

[–] [email protected] 5 points 9 months ago* (last edited 9 months ago)

There is a very strange, and maybe unexpected, cultural overlap between Perl and Haskell: It's definitely possible to produce write-only Haskell, and once you get good enough writing Haskell it becomes very inviting to do so. It's generally going to be a tiny bit more robust, probably a bit slower, and do dirty things with syb regexen could never dream of. While Perl will rip a DFA through a html file while hoping for the best, Haskell will respect the tree structure and then bend it into eldritch knots, leaving you with a file that's like 50 lines of parser combinators ("it works on my files") and then five lines of completely inscrutable magic doing the actual processing.