SlashNOT

Matthew writes: A perl programmer was recently hospitalized and held for psychiatric evaluation after he became hysterical while attempting to program in Perl using Microsoft’s speech recognition software.

According to his mother, Larry Wallton became increasingly frustrated with his inability to correctly enter a single line of perl code using voice recognition. “It was getting pretty scary. I just kept hearing him yell “correction! Left-bracket! Correction! Left brace! Period! Arrgh! Correction! Forward slash! Slash! Correction! Correction!”

“When I suggested that he just go back to using the keyboard, he pointed his hook at me and told me to stay out of his business. He said that keyboards were going to be obsolete soon and he wanted to be ahead of the competition in adopting voice recognition. He was like a crazy man.”

According to Mr. Wallton’s doctor, he should make a full recovery, but his psychiatrist has recommended switching to Pascal if he intends to use voice recognition software to program in the future.