On Mon, 26 Sep 2005, John Macdonald wrote:
> On Mon, Sep 26, 2005 at 12:48:08PM -0400, Ricker, William wrote:
> > Chris Devers was however obviously looking for this rather specific
> > elaboration of Santayana's, as it captures the inevitableness.
> >
> > [ "Any sufficiently complicated c or fortran program contains an ad hoc
> > informally-
> > [ specified, bug-ridden, slow implementation of half of Common Lisp."
> > [ -Greenspun's 10th law of programming
> > [ http://philip.greenspun.com/bboard/q-and-a-fetch-msg?msg_id=000tgU
> >
> > Note - there are no laws (1..9).
>
> Actually, I think he was looking for Henry Spencer's old quote:
> "Those who do not understand Unix are doomed to reinvent it
> - badly."
Either of those, actually :-)
AS I say, I'm sure there's some witty nugget of a reformulation of those
lines based around this thread and rsync -- the Unix variant is nice and
succinct, while the Lisp one gets more specific -- but I can't be
bothered to tease it out.
In any case, the point stands: the original poster was looking for a way
to solve a problem in Perl that rsync already has tackled. Perl is a
nice tool and suitable for many purposes, but there are limits beyond
which even the roundest of reinvented wheels can get no rounder, and
rsync is clearly the roundest wheel for this job :-)
--
Chris Devers
ÝSB½ÚF5 {Dp
_______________________________________________
Boston-pm mailing list
[email protected]
http://mail.pm.org/mailman/listinfo/boston-pm
