Let’s put it this way: You can produce unreadable code in basically any language. With Perl, it is just a bit easier.

And of course if you have the discipline of a good programmer, even your casual Perl programs should be readable. That’s what differenciates a good programmer from a hacker.

I have to admit that using CL-PPCRE does not really help me understanding the regexp any better. But this may be because I deal with complex regexps for decades now, and I just read them.

Normal for a soft- or hardware project designed by a political committee.

Short: Yes, of course. Long: Well, this is really a long answer, depending on your needs…

Thanks! Now I know what that meme is about.

At least those were a) just banner ads and b) not as annoying as modern JS/HTML5/popup/popover ads are. You just scrolled down a few pixel, and had 100% information.

FDunny, though, that I only know Pepperidge Farm from memes. I assume that is/was an American brand, right?

Those were one of the later plagues, too.

My first contact with the web (I had been in the internet for some time already) was when a collegue at university told me about the Arena browser, and this new system, “like Gopher, but with Hypertext and pictures”. And yes, I’ve seen the CERN website, served from Tim Barners-Lee’s NeXT cube, too.

So yes, I knew the web before there were ads, the internet when services were normally open to all sides, and when people on the internet that were actually much smarter than average.

I remember life without adblockers. Back when they were not needed, because web sited did not have ads.

It is a shame to have something like school lunch debts in the first place. This is something that should be free from the start.

I know. I was there, before Sanford Wallace invented the email spam and forced any sane SMTP server into password protections and whitelists.

“Low volume” vs. “A few hundred mails per month”

OK, what of the above?

You should put fixed IP addresses outside the DHCP allocation range. While a DHCP server might be smart enough to exclude a fixed address automatically, this is not a must. So better safe than sorry.

Once upon a time, gopher was actually a supported protocol. Translating from gopher to HTML is an easy job.

My first introduction to the web actually was “like gopher, but with hypertext and a gui.”

That’s why professionals use XML or JSON for this kind of projects and SQL for that kind of projects. And sometimes even both. It simply depends on the kind of problem to solve.

That’s why I work with an extraordinary diligence to avoid making errors from the very start. Debugging is only a measure of last resort.

One of the key problems of learning VHDL at universities is that most teachers there are amazingly clueless about the language. Not only do you need a bit of a different mindset (you do not program, you define), but their knowledge of language and systems is stuck in the last century.

When I was a regular in a VHDL group on the site we don’t mention here, we regularly had students who got taught techniques that are obsolete or at least deprecated since 1989.

Heisenbug. Nasty buggers, especially in my domain: Embedded Engineering. When you are in the debugger, the whole processor is stopped, missing tons of data coming in, missing interrupts, getting network timeouts, etc. More often than not, resuming makes no sense, and you have to get straight to reboot.

I don’t make money with it, on the contrary - my son is a bit more direct here and claims I’m wasting money ;-) It is just a hobby. OK, a big one. I build my own models for fun and exhibit them at shows and events.

And: Curiosity is good. It kept the human race advancing.