(no subject)

[learnedax]

I'm not the only one who's written perl* just to construct an LJ comment, right?

... right?

*or some similar lightweight script

Comments

[herooftheage.livejournal.com]

Correct.

[rufinia.livejournal.com]

::raises eyebrow::

Probably not.

[page-of-swords.livejournal.com]

Not in the least, SSI's back to my box :)

[metahacker.livejournal.com]

print("I've written perl in comments for demonstration purposes, but that's about it.");

[londo.livejournal.com]

I'm not sure how I feel about Perl being described as a "lightweight" language.

[dsrtao]

Perl can be written lightweight. Perl can be written heavyweight. You can write BASIC in Perl, C in Perl, and Lisp in Perl, only with some squiggly brackets as well as parens.

[dglenn.livejournal.com]

Er ... I presume csh/tcsh counts; what about sed?

You can guess my answer based on my questions.

[katkt.livejournal.com]

This makes me curious what it is you wanted to say in an lj comment that required a programming language to construct. I don't usually find that the things I was to put in a comment are subject to simplification through coding.

This comment, for example, would just be much more complicated if I were to create it using perl. I suppose I might be able to do some sort of compression algorithm on it so that the code was shorter than the comment, but it would still take much longer to generate, because I'd have to figure out the algorithm, and I'd probably still have to type out this whole comment and feed it it.

I could see if you were giving some sort of formatted list or if you had some data you wanted to massage and then give to someone, but ... those aren't the sorts of things I frequently end up putting in LJ comments.

[learnedax.livejournal.com]

I had a list of N questions, which I wanted to quote interleaved with N unquoted responses, so I passed the initial list through a script to wrap every line in <em>XYZ</em>

[hakamadare.livejournal.com]

i write all my comments (and my posts, when i do post) in Markdown, and then use a Cocoa TextService to do the conversion right in my browser’s input field.

for trivial comments (one that do not strictly require any HTML markup) the process takes only a few seconds longer than it would take to just let LJ autoformat; for any comment that requires markup (emphasis, links, lists) the process is much quicker and less prone to error than writing the HTML by hand would be for me.

-steve

[learnedax.livejournal.com]

You know, that looks like a really useful set of tools, and I think I may start using them (at least when at home). In this one-off instance I would have used a script to pre-mark the stuff I was quoting anyway, but there are a lot of things Markdown would make easier.

[jducoeur]

<ObLangSnobbery>I haven't, but probably would. But in Ruby, of course, rather than Perl...</ObLangSnobbery>

[learnedax.livejournal.com]

ObRetort: in superlightweight scripting, as in so many areas, Ruby remains the bastard stepchild of perl. But at least you can be glad that oneliners like

cat <file> | ruby -ne 'printf("%-6s%s", $., $_)'

(which as you can plainly see adds line numbers to a file) demonstrate the inherent cleanliness that Ruby lords over perl.