A figure in contemporary American social criticism once opined, "If it hasn't been on TV or the Movies, then as far as the masses are concerned, it doesn't exist."
The proposition is obviously dubious, but this raises a question. Java, Unix, Windows et al have been mentioned in the popular media in various contexts. Can Perl boast the same success in piercing the veil of public awareness? Has anyone ever seen or heard a reference to perl in 1) a motion picture; 2) a television show or tv news broadcast (other than some strictly technical program); or 3) a book or other popular media context that was not intended for a technial audience? (e.g., comic book, novel, biography etc)
Very interested to know if it has a toehold in the mindshare of at least a tiny percentage of non-technically-oriented Americans (or any other country).
Portions of some of Tom C's FAQ code appeared on screen in Sphere, as documented in the perl timeline (scroll down a bit to see the '98 entry).
Update: And then there was the perl implementation of Schneier's Solitaire in perl in Cryptonomicon ( 0060512806 ); of course one might haggle about that book being geared at a technical audience. :)
And another one: A Hymn Before Battle ( 0671318411 ), in which the main character is an ex-Army Sgt who's become a webmonkey and is described in passing as "a junior associate web consultant with an Atlanta web-page design firm. What this meant in practice was that he worked eight to twelve hours a day with HTML, Java and Perl." It's only a passing mention, but . . .
Ever heard of ruby, for example?
------------ :Wq Not an editor command: Wq
Honestly I think some languages that have been over medialised have more suffered than benefited. (sorry, pure supposition here, nothing to support my theory). Do the guys who run the china place down the road need to know about perl? Or do you mean budding programmers? These I would hope will here about perl should it ever be relevant to something they do.
Not to be elitist or anything, but do we want the whole world knocking on our door? I'd prefer *real programmers* (definition left for the reader), than people just trying to create their website and not needing it anywhere else.. (Still September, isnt it? :)
C.
Not to be elitist or anything,Don't sweat it. As they said in Get Your War On:
If 'elitist' just means 'not the dumbest motherfucker in the room,' I'll be an elitist!
-----------------------
You are what you think.
Perl shouldn't be anyone's first language anyway, so it's not a good idea to introduce it to people who haven't already heard of it from a programming background.
We're not really tightening our belts, it just feels that way because we're getting fatter.
And I don't think a children's song should contain the lyrics It's all about the devil and I've learned to hate him so.
And I was never able to solve a Scooby Doo case, but that's a whole other subject.
Wassercrats your comments ar patronising and elitist in the worst possible way; Comparing nontechnical people to kids is, at best, really arrogant as there are probably quite a few non-programmers who are smarter than you or I. Similarly, assuming that kids don't always get the 'adult' jokes in cartoons is plan dumb; A lot of kids are far smarter and more perceptive than adults give them credit for.
Elgon
"Stercus! Dixit Pooh. Eeyore, missilis lux navigii heffalumporum iaculas. Piglet, mecum ad cellae migratae secundae concurras."
Disagree.
One of the reasons that I love The Simpsons is that they slip in a few clever jokes here and there -- the show has broad appeal precisely because it appeals to kids of all ages. This is a lesson that they learned at the feet of Bugs Bunny, Daffy Duck, Elmer Fudd, Yosemite Sam, Foghorn Longhorn (the loudmouthed rooster -- is that name right?) and others -- I watched those in black and white as a kid, and revisiting them in my teens revealed another angle that had been subtly introduced -- adult humour that would go over the kids heads but make the adults smile. And I love that kind of intelligent humour, that's right up my alley.
And anyone who reads lyrics about the devil into the Flintstones really needs to chill out. It's a theme song about a cartoon, folks. It's the same kind of people who find the FreeBSD logo (the cute devil with his pitchfork -- he's a *daemon*, and he *forks* processes -- geddit?) offensive -- or the ones who made Procter and Gamble change their logo because they could 'see' the devil's face.
To paraphrase Chip Salzenburg on the YAPC list recently: Chill. Out. People.
Alex / talexb / Toronto
Life is short: get busy!
I used to watch the Power Puff girls and Duckman as an adult, but they were intended for adults, even though the Power Puff girls ended up with a large child-audience. That's semi-acceptable, but not for Bugs Bunny or the Flintstones.
I wasn't reading anything into the Flintstones lyrics. I was talking about the other song on that page, titled Open Up Your Heart and Let the Sunshine In, sung by Pebbles and Bamm Bamm in one episode, and on records.
Ever seen the WWII Donald Duck propaganda cartoons? Now there's something that's inappropriate for kids.
By the way:
Most kids might not need to know what terra firma is, but I can't figure out why an educational program (cartoon or otherwise) should not have a reference to it.
Joost
"No kid needs to know what terra firma is. Even educational cartoons shouldn't have such a reference, especially without explaining it."
Kids even more than adults learn things threw context and repetion, not explanation. The more you dumb down cartons because you think kids aren't smart, the stupider you encourage kids to be.
___________
Eric Hodges
our @item = reverse (114, 101, 107, 99, 97, 104, 32, 108, 114, 101, 80, 32, 114, 101, 104, 116, 111, 110, 97, 32, 116, 115, 117, 74); local $my = reverse ")meti@\ ,rhc (pam tnirp";eval $my;
The reason why there are so many "adult" jokes in Bug Bunny is simple. When they were originally made 1930s/1940s (at least the classic ones) they were not made for kids. They were shown at the begining of movies with the newsreels (which many times were about WW2, so also not for kids). The same is true for the old Tom & Jerry cartoons. They had adult jokes because that was the target audience. Keep in mind that, at the time, animation was a relatively new technology (for mass audiences that is), and hadn't yet gotten the stigma of being "just for kids".
How and why these cartoons, originally intended for adult audiences, made their way to stock "kids" programming is a whole other issue. If you watch, for instance Tom & Jerry, in chronological order (yes I have done that, my friend got 15 VCD of them from Taiwan and we watched just about all of them). You will notice the decline in "adult" humor as the years go by, you will also see the decline in racist "humor" (Tom's original owner was very much a "Mammy" stereotype) and WW2 references (there were many in early Bugs Bunny too, and even some WW2 propoganda films featuring Bugs).
As for the Flinstones, it was a blatent rip-off of the Honeymooners, and originally aired in prime-time back in the 1960s. Now we may not think of prime-time as an adult time-slot nowadays, but back then, it was. Sure some kids saw it, but they (again) were not the target audience. Its humor, and storylines were very much oriented towards adults, this can be seen best in the Winston cigarette ad featuring Fred and Barney. You can find a Real Video stream linked of this page, or the direct Real Video stream here. Be sure to listen to the whole thing, at the end the announcer says "The Flinstones were brought to you by Winston".
Just because its a cartoon, doens't mean its only for kids. Any Manga/Anime fan will tell you that.
@a = ("a".."z"," ","-","\n");foreach $b (
12,0,17,10,24,12,14,14,13,26,8,18,26,0,26,
22,0,13,13,0,27,1,4,26,15,4,17,11,26,7,0,
2,10,4,17) {print $a[$b]};print $a[28];
--tidiness is the memory loss of environmental mnemonics
I don't know much about hairdressing, law cases, making play-dooh, or the sex life of dung beetles. I don't blame TV for never mentioning it. Nor do I think it's a big loss for my life. (It could very well be a big loss - but don't tell me. If I don't know, I won't feel sad).
Abigail
Well it does not matter whether the average Joe knows about Perl, but it does matter whether the average nontechnical manager has ever heard of it. If they always hear about Java, but have never heard of Perl, how do you think they'll react if one guy suggests implementing something in Java and the other in Perl?
I may not be paining my flat myself, but if the mister painter asks me whether I want him to use brand A or B and I've heard a lot good about A (and have no way of telling whether it's true or not) and never heard of B, I'll probably want A. And even more likely if he tells me B is much cheaper.
Jenda
Always code as if the guy who ends up maintaining your code
will be a violent psychopath who knows where you live.
-- Rick Osborne
If they always hear about Java, but have never heard of Perl, how do you think they'll react if one guy suggests implementing something in Java and the other in Perl?So, Java first got the mass-media coverage, and then became a popular language? My memory might be screwed up, but I think that Java established itself as a popular language without the "masses" knowing about Java.
Abigail
AFAIK Java did get a lot of media coverage thanks to Sun's funding from the very beginning. Sure most of that was in the IT and business oriented periodics, but when it comes to hype I do believe you'd have a hard task to find a comparable case. But maybe here speaks my strong dislike of Java.
Jenda
Always code as if the guy who ends up maintaining your code
will be a violent psychopath who knows where you live.
-- Rick Osborne