/.上的回帖

以下回帖节选自/.上又一篇关于perl有所为有所不为的争论：

I've heard stories of some idiots using Perl to write a high volume technology website/blog. I'm still trying to find out what site it is.

——说的就是/.嘛！

My favorite "You did WHAT in perl?" response is: On several projects, when there were portability problems, I've created a Makefile entry that runs a "man foo" command and pipes the data to a perl script, which generates C files for that system. It's typically just header files, but sometimes also a few .c files with data structures and/or simple functions to intercede with variant library routines.

It's fun to watch people's reaction when they realize that "You wrote a perl script that reads the manual and generates the code?" I just respond something like "Uh, yeah; you got a problem with that?"

Especially fun has been the couple of discussions in which I expressed a great deal of skepticism of various "AI" claims. Then someone brings up the fact that I write perl programs that read English-language docs and generate code from them. They're obviously puzzled by the fact that I do this while looking skeptically at "AI" proposals. It's like they expect me to just shrug and write other impossible things in perl.