Problems with Perl's in-memory buffers

Perl does lots of things that make life easier, from postfix conditional and looping constructs, to DWIM-infused language design. One of interesting things I discovered when learning to open a file was that Perl can treat a scalar as an in-memory file:

my $string = "many\nlines\nof\ntext";
open my $in, '<', \$string;
while (<$in>) { print }

Still no partial checkouts in Git

Update: Git 1.7.0 now supports “sparse” checkouts (quick overview).

Richard Fine has an excellent blog post discussing why it’s time to stop using Subversion. I was struck by the similarities between his reasons for leaving SVN in the dust and mine: