Plurrrr

After the disappointment of my X1 Nano and learning that all future Intel “Evo”-branded laptops would lack S3 suspend, I started thinking about returning to my M1 MacBook full-time or building an OpenBSD desktop. I chose the latter, building my first desktop machine in many years.

I publish Perl stories on this blog once a week, and it seems every time there’s at least one response on social media that amounts to, “I hate Perl because of its weird syntax.” Or, “It looks like line noise.” (Perl seems to have outlasted that one — when’s the last time you used an acoustic modem?) Or the quote attributed to Keith Bostic: “The only language that looks the same before and after RSA encryption.”

So let’s address, confront, and demystify this hate. What are these objectionable syntactical, noisy, possibly encrypted bits? And why does Perl have them?

The best case depth for a search tree is O(log_b n), if b is the arity (or branching) of the tree. Intuitively, we know that if we increase b, the depth goes down, but is that all there is to it? And if not, how do we chose the optimal branching b?

Many git tutorials focus on a set of commands and instructions to “get you up to speed” in git, without addressing the underlying concept of “how git works”. While the commands are important, I feel it’s more important for you to understand what’s going on behind the scenes.