marocddot

I miss Perl If a computer language could be hardcore punk, it would be #perl. It annoyed the hell out of developers when I wrote code in it. Over 27 years ago I wrote AFT https://maplefish.com/todd/aft.html (or you can "apt install aft" under Ubuntu) It's been 15 years since I released the latest version and it still works on any basic Perl distro.

"...the street finds its own uses for things" (William Gibson, Burning Chrome) is probably my favorite literary line to quote, regarding use of tech. It's something of a mantra I repeat to remind myself that every technology created, whether through academia or big evil industry, will eventually be co-opted by the people and put to uses never intended. This was the essence of (old school) hacking. My street tools have been #perl #forth #awk and #tcl

Interesting realization/observation (to me at least). My MacBook (Tahoe 26.1), OpenBSD (7.9) and various Linux laptops, SBCs, etc all have a fairly modern Perl (5.xx) installed by default. I start wondering if I should be writing more of my portable (no dependency) stuff in #perl

@Wintermute_BBS@oldbytes.space Oh now I have an ear worm... not a bad ear worm, but now I can't get it out my head. 😜

A bit dramatic, but I have been looking for a way of writing portable apps that don't depend on anything. This used to be, in the dark ages, the way we wrote things. I've been trying this with awk but it turns out that network access is not possible without external help (dependencies) or gawk (which isn't installed everywhere).

I've tried this here https://maplefish.com/todd/squawk.html (a secure chat system in gawk, but it does require an openssl binary, and of course gawk, which isn't the default awk on most systems I use).