Perl

Now that another decade comes to an end, it is time for me to see if the ten years really were worth the effort. Overall it seems to have been more pain than was strictly necessary. 2000 - it all started quite nice. I just turned 30 and was living in London, just got together with my girlfriend and working for guideguide a very nice start-up which was going quite well at the time. One highlight of the year was a trip to OSCON in California, where I witnessed the beginning of Perl6, which seemed brilliant at the time and now appears a bit pointless. 2001 - will always be remembered for 9/11, someone in the guideguide office heard about it over IRC and we quickly confirmed it on TV. It was also the year where I bought my first iPod, maybe the only trend I ever spotted early. Nobody at the time imagined how either 9/11 or the iPod would shape the future. 2002 - I split up from my girlfriend for a while and decided that this would be the right moment to start drinking alcohol again after ten years. 2003 - guideguide was scaling down a lot now and I had to fire lots of people, which was probably one of the most stressful episodes of my business life so far. 2004 - with not much left of the company I decided I could as well move to Barcelona and work from there. It turned out to be a lot of fun and a lot more relaxed than London. It was also the year where I got ill and fixed up again. 2005 - a bit of work, a bit of travel, a lot of recovery 2006 - I quit guideguide after lots of years. It was a difficult decision, but nobody of the old gang was still around, so I didn’t feel too bad. I was also looking for a local job and just being employed for a change. I used the rest of the year to chill and enjoy Barcelona. 2007 - Found a new job at opus5, learned lots of new stuff. For some reason the founder left after I just started, is it me ? 2008 - whatever happened to 2008? 2009 - I decided to stop drinking again, turned out to not be my thing after all. The economy made this year really interesting and I hope it will turn up some new opportunities in the future. Oh, and I turned 40 and I am looking forward to my mid-life-crisis, but that is the topic of another post. And finally thanks to everyone who made these years more fun then they sound: my girlfriend Cat, who makes everything more lovelymy family: Kathrin, Thomas, Klaus and Ulla, who helped me through some rubbish Mikel, who brought me to London the guideguide guys: Andy, Adam, Alex, Marc, Rob, Jasper, Ben, Luke, …, who made me learn a lot and fast The Londoners: Anita, Justin and Graham who made it more fun Opus5: Dennis & Pablo, where I learned a lot of stuff I didn’t wanted to knowSo lets see what the next decade brings, maybe a new start and the opportunity to do completely new mistakes! Here are some random pictures from the past ten years

As I recently started learning Python one of the things I noticed which I didn’t like is the class syntax. So I wrote some minimal hello world programs in the languages I recently used to show the difference: C++ hello.cc#include class Hello { private: char value; public: Hello(char newvalue) { value = newvalue; } public: void hello() { std::cout « this->value; } }; int main() { Hello hello(“hello\n"); hello.hello(); } I like the C++ syntax, it is the language which introduced me to OOP and it it clearly states what bits are what without too wordy syntax. Java: hello.java class Hello { private String value; public Hello (String newvalue) { this.value = newvalue; } public void hello(){ System.out.println(this.value); } } class main { public static void main(String args[]){ Hello hello = new Hello (“hello”); hello.hello (); } } Also very nice, a bit clearer than C++. PHP: hello.php «/span>?php class Hello { private $value; function __construct($newvalue) { $this->value = $newvalue; } function hello() { echo $this->value; } } $hello = new Hello(“hello\n"); $hello->hello(); From the dynamic languages this one is the clearest. Except of the __construct() constructor, where I prefer the ClassName() syntax (which still works in PHP5) Perl: hello.pl package Hello; sub new { my ($class,$newvalue) = @_; bless { newvalue => $newvalue }, $class; } sub hello { my $this = shift; print $this->{newvalue}; } package main; $main::hello = new Hello(“hello\n"); $main::hello->hello(); I always hated objects (and functions) in Perl, there is no parameter syntax for functions or methods. Most of it is not enforced and you can use functions in objects in thousands different ways. Python: hello.py class Hello: _value = ”" def init(self,newvalue): self._value = newvalue def hello(self): print self._value; hello = Hello(“hello”) hello.hello() A lot clearer than Perl, but also a lot of convention instead of forced syntax. I got used to the indention by now. But I hate that I have to specify “self” as the first parameters, the init syntax and the underscore prefixing of private or protected variables. At least it has proper function parameters.