Complain with Caution

The other night on the phone with a good friend in Albuquerque, I vented my objections regarding my econometrics course and the requirement to do all of these ridiculous matrix manipulations and abstract calculations by hand. The course is a pain, I asserted. We have computers for this sort of thing.

Sure enough, the next day, the professor walks in smiling, "I imagine some of you are weary of all the calculations, derivations, and proofs we've gone through, but it's important to a genuine understanding the matrices involved."

He then adds, "For next week, we'll let computers do the work. The computers on the fourth floor have SAS installed. For next week, write a SAS program to perform the following analysis."

WHAT??!!
When I was complaining about having to do all this stuff by hand, writing and running code in the ultra friendly, intuitive, and easy to learn SAS environment was not exactly the solution I had in mind.

The professor has a Web site for homework, an application he wrote himself. I asked him what language he used. He said, "Perl."

Perl?! He chose to write an application in Perl?

Human beings write programs in C, C++, or if they're really lucky, Java. Java rules. Those unfortunate enough (poor Stacy) get sucked into that .NET stuff.

I kid the reader not. This is Perl:

@P=split//,".URRUU\c8R";@d=split//,"\nrekcah xinU / lreP rehtona tsuJ";sub p{
@p{"r$p","u$p"}=(P,P);pipe"r$p","u$p";++$p;($q*=2)+=$f=!fork;map{$P=$P[$f^ord
($p{$_})&6];$p{$_}=/ ^$P/ix?$P:close$_}keys%p}p;p;p;p;p;map{$p{$_}=~/^[P.]/&&
close$_}%p;wait until$?;map{/^r/&&<$_>}%p;$_=$d[$q];sleep rand(2)if/\S/;print

The people who write in Perl are not homo sapiens. They are a different species entirely, perlillious maxochistimus excruciatus.

I am taking a course from one of these creatures.