dave.org.uk

Flaming June and Fire Up Mary

Over the last couple of years I've been getting back into the habit of seeing live music. But most of the gigs I've seen recently have been at relatively large venues. I haven't been going to places like Wembley Arena, but I've seen a lot of gigs at places like the Union Chapel and the Barbican Centre.

Alice in Wonderland

I've just got back from seeing Alice in Wonderland and I'm now feeling rather depressed and am starting to despair for the future of the film industry.

Let's get the positive aspects out of the way first. The cast is wonderful and the acting impressive. I particularly enjoyed the little comedic touches that Anne Hathaway brought to the potentially quite bland White Queen. The visual effects were also fantastic. Burton's imagination together with state of the art technology has given us a wonderful vision of how Wonderland should look.

So what didn't I like? Well, firstly, I saw it in 3D. It's the first time I've seen a 3D film outside of an IMAX so I didn't really know what to expect. And it was all a bit disappointing. It was disappointing because the technology didn't really seem to be ready for the mass market. During fast-moving sequences things got far too blurry. It was also disappointing because the 3D effect wasn't very convincing. The image just had a background plain and two or three foreground plains. It looked a bit like cardboard cut-outs in a child's theatre toy. And lastly it was disappointing because directors (or maybe it's cinematographers) are still unable to resist the temptation to fill 3D films with shots that wouldn't look out of place in a "This is 3D" demonstration film. Fight scenes were full of swords being jabbed in your eye and chase scenes all had overhanging branches to whizz impressively past. It was all very obvious.

But that's not my major reason for disliking the film so much. That's down to the plot. I don't know if you've seen the film yet, but did you know it's not a retelling of Lewis Carroll's book? No, Tim Burton decided that what we wanted was a kind of "Return to Wonderland" plot where he mixes scenes from "Alice's Adventures in Wonderland" with "Through the Looking Glass" and a nineteen-year-old Alice. On Alice's return she meets up with all her old friends and gets embroiled in a battle between the Red Queen (aka the Queen if Hearts) and the White Queen. In the end she has to fight the Jabberwock in order to save the day.

It's terrible. It makes no sense whatsoever. Ok, I know that complaining about logic in a Wonderland story is somewhat ridiculous, but what I'm saying is that I don't understand why Burton had to play with the plot like that. It's like my objections to the BBC's Merlin. I worry that a new generation of children will be introduced to the story through a warped version and won't ever read the real version. Burton ended up with a pretty good fantasy plot. Why did he have to attach it to the much-loved Wonderland characters? Why not just go off and make a film with his own characters? I don't really feel that using the Wonderland characters added very much to the plot. This story could just as well been told using characters from the Narnia stories or the Lord of the Rings.

There were two things that Burton did in the film that I may never be able to forgive him for. Firstly, whenever characters mention the Jabberwock, they call it "Jabberwocky". "Jabberwocky" is the name of the poem. The  creature has always been the Jabberwock, The second point also involves the poem Jabberwocky. The Mad Hatter (played by Johnny Depp) recites some of the poem in the film. But he does it wrong. Verses are muddled up and lines are changed. It's appalling. It shouldn't be allowed.

I really wanted to see this film. Burton and Carroll looked like they were going to be a fantastic match. I'm massively disappointed that the film was so bad.

Crufty Old Perl

It's eighteen months since I wrote "Why Corporates Hate Perl" and it's worth pointing out that the company I discussed in that article which was dropping Perl in favour of PHP and Java is still employing as many good Perl programmers as it can find.

I talked in that article about some rather unsubtle social engineering that had been going on at that company. Management had started to talk about Perl as a "legacy language" in an attempt to persuade the business that they really don't want their applications written in Perl. That doesn't seem to have been as successful as I feared it would be.

But there's another kind of social engineering that I've seen going on. And this is happening at the developer level. I've lost count of the number of times I've been sitting in meetings with developers, discussing ways to improve the quality of crufty old Perl code when someone throws in the (more than half-serious) suggestion that we should just rewrite the whole thing using Rails or Django.

There seems to be this idea that switching to a new framework in a new language will act as some time of magic bullet and that suddenly all of our problems will be solved. There are so many ways that this perception is flawed, Here are my two favourites.

1. The current system is old and crufty not because it's written in Perl, but because it was written by people who didn't understand the business requirements fully, didn't know their tools particularly well or were under pressure to deliver on a timescale that didn't give them time to design the system properly. Often it's a combination of all three. Given the time to rewrite the system from scratch, of course it will be better. But it will be better because the business is better understood and tools and techniques have been improved - not because it's no longer written in Perl.
2. Frameworks in other languages are not easier to use or more powerful than frameworks in Perl. Anything that you can do with Rails or Django you can do just as easily with Catalyst. It's using a framework that's the big win here, not the particular framework that you use. Sure, if you're a Ruby house then using a Ruby framework will probably match your existing developers' skills more closely but if your current system is written in Perl then, hopefully, you have a team of people with Perl skills and that's going to be the language you'll want to look at.

I'm tired of Perl being seen as a second-class citizen in the dynamic languages world. I freely admit that there's a lot of bad Perl code out there (I'll even admit to writing some of it) but it's not bad Perl code because it's Perl, it's bad Perl code because it's bad code.

This is what the Perl marketing initiative is for. We need people to know that Perl is not the same language that they stopped using ten years ago. Modern Perl can compete with any of the features of any other dynamic language.

By al means, try to get the time to rewrite your crufty old systems. But rewrite them in Modern Perl. You'll enjoy it and you'll be really productive.

p.s. I should point out that I'm not talking about any specific client here. This is based on conversations that I've had at various companies over the last couple of years and also discussions with many developers in many pubs.

Gigs for Old Gits

It's been a busy couple of weeks for gigs. On the assumption that at least some of my readers have similar tastes to me, here are brief reviews of the three gigs I've seen in the last couple of weeks.

Fairport Convention, Union Chapel, 20th Feb
This is the second year running that I've seen Fairport Convention on their "Wintour" at the Union Chapel. Last year was the first time I had seen them (which is bizarre for a band I've been a fan of for over thirty years). I can't quite put my finger on it, but this year's show wasn't as enjoyable as last year's. I suspect it was down to the number of songs taken from later Fairport albums that I'm not at all familiar with. Oh, and the arrangement of Matty Groves was very strange. The long instrumental that ends the song was unrecognisable.

Thomas Dolby and Friends, Union Chapel, 28th Feb
Something a little more up to date. This was Thomas Dolby bringing back together the band who had recorded and toured his second album, The Flat Earth. As an extra twist, the band (who haven't played together for over twenty-five years) didn't rehearse at all. They met on stage and worked the songs out in a two-hour "live rehearsal". They then went of for a brief break before returning to play a half-hour set.

The rehearsal was fun. And the band sounded great for a band eho hadn't played together for so long. There were also a few guest stars - including Trevor Horn who played bass on "Airwaves". The only slight disappointment was that the rehearsal overran so the final set had to be cut short.

John Cale, Royal Festival Hall, 5th March
I'm not a huge John Cale fan. I generally like the stuff of his that I hear, but I haven't really heard much of it. This concert had him playing the whole of hist album "Paris 1919" (from 1973). This isn't an album that I'd heard at all until I started to listen to it in preparation for this show and it's really not that representative of the rest of his music. But it's a great album and it was interesting to hear it all played live. It is, however, a rather short album (many were back in the early 70s) and that part of the show only lasted forty minutes. After a short break (and it was really short) the band returned to play another forty minutes of "the best of John Cale". I was pretty surprised to realise that I recognised most of these songs. All in all, a great night out.

Plug Plug Plug

I've got another set of public training courses coming up next month. They will be held at the Imperial Hotel in Russell Square, London.

There are three one-day courses - Introduction to Perl, Intermediate Perl and Advance Perl. They're running on the 13th, 14th and 15th of April.

More details on my training web site. Hope to see some of you there.

p.s. Gabor has been kind enough to advertise the courses on his newly revamped CPAN Forum site - so the least I can do is to repay the favour and recommend that you have a look at the site.