Is Perl 6 Being Renamed?

The BBC, the world’s largest broadcaster, had Perl everywhere. They decided to ditch it. MongoDB claims that their clients aren’t developing any new projects in Perl, so they’re ditching Perl 5 support. Other companies are continuing this trend and this is, as potential clients have told me, because they’re tired of waiting for Perl 6. They think Perl 6 is the successor to Perl 5 and given the name, it makes perfect sense. Combine that with the negative press about Perl 5 and you get into “nobody got fired for buying IBM” territory, but s/Perl/$other_language/g.

Source: Is Perl 6 Being Renamed? | Ovid [blogs.perl.org]

Overcoming Intuition in Programming

 I get a lot of questions from aspiring programmers on what’s the best tool or languages to learn. It’s almost always a premature question to ask. I used to come up with answers like “depending on what you’re building” or “pick a beginner friendly community” or “invest in a growing language”. I think all of these are good answers, but it doesn’t really matter that early on in a programmer’s learning journey. It’s all the same when you’re essentially learning how to compute. Furthermore, these sort of answers enable the culture of tooling obsession.

Source: Overcoming Intuition in Programming

BASIC at 50

At 4 a.m. on May 1, 1964, in the basement of College Hall, Professor John Kemeny and a student programmer simultaneously typed RUN on neighboring terminals. When they both got back correct answers to their simple programs, time-sharing and BASIC were born.

via BASIC at 50.

Natural Language Toolkit — NLTK 2.0 documentation

NLTK is a leading platform for building Python programs to work with human language data. It provides easy-to-use interfaces to over 50 corpora and lexical resources such as WordNet, along with a suite of text processing libraries for classification, tokenization, stemming, tagging, parsing, and semantic reasoning.

via Natural Language Toolkit — NLTK 2.0 documentation.

From: http://www.cloudera.com/blog/2010/03/natural-language-processing-with-hadoop-and-python/

NLP is a highly interdisciplinary field of study comprising of concepts and ideas from Mathematics, Computer Science and Linguistics. Naturally occurring instances of human language, be it text or speech, are growing at an exponential rate given the popularity of the Web and social media. In addition, people are increasingly becoming more and more reliant on internet services to search, filter, process and, in some cases, even understand the subset of such instances they encounter in their daily lives.

NLP = Natural Language Processing