Computer says "no."

[reddragdiva]

• Betty Ford Clinic pics up. Usual rules. Please assist with names.

We have all finished reading Aslan Saves Middle Earth from the NAZIS! Not that it took long. At least it was a better finish than The Many-Coloured Land, where by the ninth book you could tell the author was hating every word individually and could hear her bludgeoning the keyboard with her face. Fantasy epics: Just Say Fuck No.

I'm on a Perl training course this week. I am told that my initial assessment that it consists entirely of quirks and silly tricks and that they then bolted on flow control, OO, etc around version 4 or 5 is reasonably near the money. It's like what people who learnt programming in TRS-80 BASIC would go on to invent when given real computers. (In reality, the people who would have been programming in TRS-80 BASIC invented PHP instead, writing the interpreter in C code inspired by TRS-80 BASIC.)

(Perl programmers: please stop by perlsurvey.org, being done by damned_colonial.)

There is somewhat of a cultural divide in those on the course: myself, the other sysadmin and the deaf webmaster (whose signing translators are tearing their hair out keeping up with the fast-flowing tech speak) on one side and the other webmasters on the other. It took one two hours yesterday to realise that computers follow a precise list of instructions for every single thing they do — she'd never consciously understood this before. I would have thought it a prerequisite for a, y'know, programming course. And she's not stupid.

I realise this is what leads to goatseing MySpace. I'm not sure what can be done about it — how to communicate this disastrously lacking piece of cultural literacy more widely. IT'S NOT A HARD CONCEPT, SURELY.

Tomorrow I shall be drinking to seph_hazard's increasing age.

Freda is still ridiculously cute.