2011-04-25: Praise

In the Passover Haggadah,Jews are instructed to praise (and lots of other mostly synonyms that sound funny in modern Hebrew, and are beyond my limited English vocabulary - I could look up the translation, but I'm too lazy) God for doing all the good on their ancestors as described in the Biblical story of the Exodus from Egypt, and in later books of the Bible. I'm not a religious or observant Jew, and Passover is almost over (it's the second holiday now), but I think it'd be a good idea to "praise" people, communities, technologies etc. because while we have a lot of stuff to rant about and criticise, praise and raves give a better feeling and should be done more often.

So in this raves/recommendations/praise article, I will give some praise for stuff I encountered recently. Here goes:

The Clojure community

Seeing that Clojure is the most currently trendy modern Lisp dialect out there (and being a Java Virtual Machine-based language was actually usable), I joined its mailing list and offered a 200 USD bounty for implementing a command line scripting tool based on it, citing several places. While no one stepped to implement it, the response was extremely friendly: no one told me that "scripting was bad", or that there is no such thing as "throwaway code", or that Mark Jason Dominus/Joel on Software/Paul Graham/Larry Wall/Aristotle/whoever were speaking nonsense. They said they'd love to have a command line scripting in Lips, that Clojure was probably not the right tool for the job due to the JVM, and someone gave me constructive criticism that I should have offered a T-shirt and/or buying-a-beverage-or-meal-of-your-choice, because when offering money, then people get bitter about how large the sum is.

BDFOY and the other Stackoverflow.com Perl admins

Ask, Robrt and the @perl.org admins for keeping it mostly spam free.

#ruby-lang for being a great channel.

The people who want to improve beginners@perl.org

#stackoverflow on Freenode

Peter Ustinov on wikiquote

LLVM/clang