Pushing the envelope

I like Perl. I feel like I should go to a meeting or start a 12 point plan or something. I've volunteered to work on a project at work that is using Perl, as I've wanted to see it in action for a while, and I have to say that it is scarily seductive. It just does what you want and gets out of the way. Provided you know how to tell it what you want.

One thing in my defense: I am entirely unconvinced that there should be 'More Than One Way To Do It'. I got terribly confused with some date manipulations due to the 'localtime' function returning zero-indexed (0-11) months, and the Date::Calc module expecting 1-indexed (1-12) months. Sometimes its just easier to have Only One Way To Do It.

The OO stuff also looks like a dodgy aftermarket bolt-on...

Books and Words

Learning another language is tough. Amazingly tough. Cedric is going to post about accents some other day, which should be interesting. My accent in Spanish is horrible... I feel for the people who have to try to have conversations with me every day. I need another 3 years here at least.

-Russ [Russell Beattie Notebook]

Learning another language is certainly tough. Knowing that you used to speak one and can no longer is also a bummer. Its hardly my fault - I was 5 when we left Brazil. But when my parents recount stories of how my mother used to get me to translate for her, I feel gutted that I have (apparently) utterly lost all my Portugese. I would love to go to Brazil or Portugal to work just to see if I could regain my childhood facility with the language, but unfortunately its hard enough to maintain a software career in your native country currently, let alone try to make a go of it overseas. Darn.