do you remember

[solarbird]

So Friday's gig at the monthly Juanita Bay show got wiped out by rain, which sucks; they want me back next year, though, which is something. In the unlikely event the weather is good next weekend, I'll show and busk for a while, even though the manager is telling me that the market has wound down really hard these last two weeks.

Lake Forest Park last weekend was pretty busy, though; that one hadn't started winding down at all yet. Tomorrow is the last day of the year, and while I normally don't play anywhere two weeks in a row... well, the forecast says it might not rain. So I'll be waiting and seeing about just showing up there, as well. I'll also want to find out about winter market and whether they'd want anyone around for that; it's indoors, in the interiour commons, so the rules will be different.

The last couple of weeks have been pretty miserable for music, though, particularly the last week and a half - between Anna's surgery and recovery and the implosion of the financial markets, my stress metre is up to WTF, and I haven't been able to write anything and practicing has been a mess. At least this has all come at the end of the season, when I'm kind of playing out the summer festival-and-market string, and not, say, at peak time in August. It really has been pretty brutal, though.

Oh, and thanks to everybody who recommended books! I've bought the Llama book, the Camel book, and the suggested PHP book, and am going through the Llama now. So far this seems awfully straightforward - it's a bit like every other curly-bracket language, mixed with some bad ideas I had for my compiler class (and they were bad ideas but they were extra points because I came up with them on my own) and REXX made *nixy. Oh, and my C/C++ background demands to know who thinks using uninitialised variables is ever a good idea, other than the writer of this book. Clearly turning the warnings level ALL THE WAY UP is the only way to code in this language.

Comments

[cow.livejournal.com]

Common best practice in perl is to always "use strict;" at the top--this forces initializing variables and a host of other good practices.

[wrog]

yep. Jigger your editor so that every new perl file begins with

use strict;
use warnings;

the nontinitialized-variables crap is for the people who want to write obfuscated one-liners and say "ooo look, I can cram an entire proxy HTTP server that filters out kiddie porn onto one line".

likewise for all of the stupid things you can do with open().

[backrubbear.livejournal.com]

I'm not sure what rexx-like stuff you're observing. Personally, I miss stemmed variables. :-)

I think you'll find a lot of your WTF observations about security and variable scoping (wait until you truly figure out local vs. my) come from the fact that this language has evolved rather than having been designed.