Rui CarmoThe Register kicked it off, and now everyone's raving about running Perl on the Series 60, which is a dumb idea if I ever saw one.
Yeah, you read that right. Perl, the heavily UNIX-oriented scripting language, whose typical runtime numbers in the tens of megabytes and which has become more of a religion than most other scripting languages almost solely due to its inscrutability (to non-initiates, it looks like line noise - to experienced programmers, it looks like line noise with meaning).
Besides the usual myopia (people assume toolkit X or Y will work on a Series 60 if it's Perl-based, irrespective of dependencies, memory requirements and portability), everyone keeps forgetting that GUI bindings don't grow on trees. Perl code is not that portable - and especially not between completely different architectures. Given that the Perl port for Familiar (which is the closest analogue) is around 600KB (excluding dependencies) and lacks a lot of stuff, people are in for a disappointment.
Russ is ecstatic, of course. I'm going to have a field day watching his Java-oriented mindset wrap itself around Perl regexps and data types (or lack thereof).
Backlog
Mildly interesting stuff I came across this week.
- Battery University - deal with NiCd, NiMH and LiOn the right way
- WISPs look at Spam - Ha. Told you so...
- Eolas Going After Linux Next? - this is fairly quiet right now, but my guess is we'll be hearing more soon...
- Movement towards a Mesh Standard - creeping rather than moving, but my guess is that if there was really any demand for Wi-Fi support fully meshed networks, it would have happened by now. People just don't care.
- CC/PP emerges - could the web be going back to device-independence after years of desktop browsers?
- Apple-related RSS feeds