The one about amicable numbers in Perl 6
Aug. 18th, 2019 12:01 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
pyesetzMy ankle is continuing to improve. Sometimes I can walk for several minutes before being reminded that I broke it earlier this year. Last week I needed to quickly cross King St. in Kitchener ON and tried running a little bit. Ouch! Not quite ready for prime time just yet.
SkipTheDishes is a nicer job than Uber. Often I can gross $18/hr with them. But after gas and repairs I think my net income is still less than minimum wage.
Some of you whipper-snappers may have noticed that I double-space after sentential periods on this blog. According to this article in the New Yorker, anyone who does that is still living in the 18th century. (In fact, double-spacing after periods comes from the days of typewriters with monospace fonts, which meant that it was still considered mandatory in the 1980's when I was at university.) The modern lack of double-spaces after periods is a side-effect of the parsing rules for HTML, not a religious statement about God's own Truth regarding punctuation — although you'd never know that from the way some people talk about this shibboleth.
But what I actually want to discuss today is this blog post by Damian Conway, which is supposedly about what a great programming language Perl 6 is but spends a lot of its time talking about a useless math concept called "amicable numbers". I don't know Perl and don't care about numerical amicability, but I like the superfluous gratuitous use of Unicode characters. (Hat tip to Hacker News, several of whose commmenters complain about the unnecessary Unicode.)
I first noticed that there was something “off” about this post when I came across the link to Thābit ibn Qurra's biography, which uses the hyperlink text ثابت بن قره. “How odd,” I thought. “Why did Dr. Conway throw some inscrutable Arabic characters in the middle of his English essay? Surely he can't expect anyone to read that?” But then he uses the character 𝑠 (which is U+1D460 MATHEMATICAL ITALIC SMALL S) and justifies this behaviour as “Because we can.” It was then that I realized that Damian is one of my peeps, who decorates his posts with as much Unicode as possible instead of restraining himself to the truly necessary characters such as the guillemets « », which apparently are essential punctuation marks in Perl.
Let us also take note of the diaeresis in “naïve”, the arrow →, the em-dash —, the infinity symbol ∞, the square-root symbol √, the multiplication sign ×, the ellipsis …, and various superscripts ⁰ ¹ ² ³ ⁴ ⁵ ⁶ ⁷ ⁸ ⁹ ᴺ.
Does he really need to use 𝜌 (U+1D70C MATHEMATICAL ITALIC SMALL RHO)? Wouldn't a plain old Greek ρ do the job without having to leave the BMP? The script L in “pℓ𝐼” seems completely superfluous, since it is followed by “pmJ“ and “pnK” which make it clear(-ish) that the letter is supposed to be L and not 1 or |. The variable names “pₗpₘpₙ” (which Dr. Conway refers to as “an appropriate Unicode-named variable”) and “ᴵᴶᴷ” (which he calls “a suitably named variable”) are just him showing off that Perl will let you do shit like that — and several commenters complain that these names don’t look right on their screens.
So, overall, reading this article has helped me to understand why other furs sometimes don’t like it when I use too much 𝕌𝕟𝕚𝕔𝕠𝕕𝕖 in my blog posts.
Unfortunately, Dr. Conway's post has failed to change my opinion that the Perl language is indistinguishable from line noise and should not be used. I still can't explain why I like Bash but hate Perl, since “indistinguishable from line noise” is the only reasonable description for a Bash program that goes beyond job-control constructs and actually does some computation. But, to each his own, I guess.
One final note: besides the Unicode, Damian Conway has also shown off his erudition by using two uncommon words. Did you know that the etymology for “eldritch” is unclear? The -ritch part is clearly related to the German reich, and the ‘d’ is epenthetic, but what does the el- part mean? And his use of the phrase “shambling mound“ is apparently a reference to a D&D character from 1975⁇
SkipTheDishes is a nicer job than Uber. Often I can gross $18/hr with them. But after gas and repairs I think my net income is still less than minimum wage.
Some of you whipper-snappers may have noticed that I double-space after sentential periods on this blog. According to this article in the New Yorker, anyone who does that is still living in the 18th century. (In fact, double-spacing after periods comes from the days of typewriters with monospace fonts, which meant that it was still considered mandatory in the 1980's when I was at university.) The modern lack of double-spaces after periods is a side-effect of the parsing rules for HTML, not a religious statement about God's own Truth regarding punctuation — although you'd never know that from the way some people talk about this shibboleth.
But what I actually want to discuss today is this blog post by Damian Conway, which is supposedly about what a great programming language Perl 6 is but spends a lot of its time talking about a useless math concept called "amicable numbers". I don't know Perl and don't care about numerical amicability, but I like the superfluous gratuitous use of Unicode characters. (Hat tip to Hacker News, several of whose commmenters complain about the unnecessary Unicode.)
I first noticed that there was something “off” about this post when I came across the link to Thābit ibn Qurra's biography, which uses the hyperlink text ثابت بن قره. “How odd,” I thought. “Why did Dr. Conway throw some inscrutable Arabic characters in the middle of his English essay? Surely he can't expect anyone to read that?” But then he uses the character 𝑠 (which is U+1D460 MATHEMATICAL ITALIC SMALL S) and justifies this behaviour as “Because we can.” It was then that I realized that Damian is one of my peeps, who decorates his posts with as much Unicode as possible instead of restraining himself to the truly necessary characters such as the guillemets « », which apparently are essential punctuation marks in Perl.
Let us also take note of the diaeresis in “naïve”, the arrow →, the em-dash —, the infinity symbol ∞, the square-root symbol √, the multiplication sign ×, the ellipsis …, and various superscripts ⁰ ¹ ² ³ ⁴ ⁵ ⁶ ⁷ ⁸ ⁹ ᴺ.
Does he really need to use 𝜌 (U+1D70C MATHEMATICAL ITALIC SMALL RHO)? Wouldn't a plain old Greek ρ do the job without having to leave the BMP? The script L in “pℓ𝐼” seems completely superfluous, since it is followed by “pmJ“ and “pnK” which make it clear(-ish) that the letter is supposed to be L and not 1 or |. The variable names “pₗpₘpₙ” (which Dr. Conway refers to as “an appropriate Unicode-named variable”) and “ᴵᴶᴷ” (which he calls “a suitably named variable”) are just him showing off that Perl will let you do shit like that — and several commenters complain that these names don’t look right on their screens.
So, overall, reading this article has helped me to understand why other furs sometimes don’t like it when I use too much 𝕌𝕟𝕚𝕔𝕠𝕕𝕖 in my blog posts.
Unfortunately, Dr. Conway's post has failed to change my opinion that the Perl language is indistinguishable from line noise and should not be used. I still can't explain why I like Bash but hate Perl, since “indistinguishable from line noise” is the only reasonable description for a Bash program that goes beyond job-control constructs and actually does some computation. But, to each his own, I guess.
One final note: besides the Unicode, Damian Conway has also shown off his erudition by using two uncommon words. Did you know that the etymology for “eldritch” is unclear? The -ritch part is clearly related to the German reich, and the ‘d’ is epenthetic, but what does the el- part mean? And his use of the phrase “shambling mound“ is apparently a reference to a D&D character from 1975⁇
