Flaming one person writing in one article is ridiculous (I don’t really know or care whether that person needs flaming, I just think pinning cause and effect of wide ranging symptoms upon one individual is the equivalent in sloppy reasoning that Bryan pins upon the author himself with regard to failing to do adequate research).

In any case, at least the dude was using Perl in the first place for a current day problem.

On which point: I would have thought the best marketing for Perl is for more folk to use Perl and write about it, whatever the problem (with helpful Monks posting perhaps more erudite ways of expressing the same thing), rather than flaming folk for using it “incorrectly” or flaming them for being opinionated. That is not very good marketing, either.

I’ve taken the liberty of fixing the quotations in your first comment and deleting the second one (which no longer seemed necessary).

Thanks for offering to print my email. Please feel free to add my code snippet to it.

But I do think that both you and Nick are missing the main point of my post.
I know that most people who use Perl aren’t Perl experts and won’t keep up with the latest trends in the Perl world. I also know that many people just want to get their job done using Perl and will often do that by Googling for an answer to their problem. That will often not give them the best answer, but if it works for them then I don’t really see a problem there.

The reason for my post (and the bit that you’re ignoring) is Nick’s silly little snipe at Perl. As I pointed out above, none of the syntax in his example is unique to Perl so I don’t see why he felt it was necessary write that and I don’t see why you didn’t edit it out of the article.

I wholeheartedly approve of of your choice to write Perl tutorials though. Paul is a great teacher.

And, it’s not like magazine editors care either. They are more like project managers than editors. As long as they can fill the space they need to fill, they tend not to care what you write.

I’m sorry to hear you have such a negative opinion, Brian. I’m the editor of Linux Format, and I’d like to think we try a bit harder than just filling space – although this example does seem to have annoyed a few people.

it’s clear that Perl isn’t a language that Nick is particularly familiar with

You’re right, and I’m not unashamed to say that my own Perl knowledge is terrible – I’ve lost track of the number of times I have to refer to one of Brian’s books to help me solve a pretty remedial problem, and I honestly imagine that the kind of code I write would make any serious Perl programmer cry bitter tears. That said, like Nick, I tend to use Perl for quick hacks – I don’t think I’ve ever written a script longer than 20 lines – and so in a way I’m not particularly upset if it’s a less-than-perfect solution, because all I care about is that it works.

In this example, Nick was doing pretty much the same: it was just a quick hack to satisfy a larger, non-Perl problem. If we were writing a Perl tutorial, I would use a Perl expert and thus expect back tutorials of the highest degree.
And, believe it or not, I do care about Perl. I met Paul Fenwick a few months ago, and he agreed to write a Perl tutorial series for us – I hope you agree with my choice!

In the meantime, I’ll print your email in the magazine as a correction. Would it be OK if I also included your suggestion of “perl -MCGI=escape -e’print escape “@ARGV”‘”?

Paul
–
Paul Hudson
Editor, Linux Format

It’s not that hard to ask the world how to get something done and likely get really good answers within an hour. The job of a writer is to do that research and present the final product to the audience. Instead, he admits to cargo-culting it. What he’s really telling the world is that he doesn’t care enough to do a good job or learn more.

There’s no point marketing to people who don’t care.

And, it’s not like magazine editors care either. They are more like project managers than editors. As long as they can fill the space they need to fill, they tend not to care what you write.

The inclusion of a Perl one-liner was to solve a problem that would have been more complex to do simply in bash. I could’ve used Python (in which case urllib.urlencode() would have done the job), but coming off the back of writing a Python column for about 18 months, my guess was the LXF team didn’t want me to start writing Bash tutorials in Python too.

As it was that line looks more complicated to the average reader than the rest of the code. As you’ve pointed out, it could have been achieved more simply, so thanks for that. Though, the one-liner I used seems to pop up in various places, so I’m clearly not the only one who needs re-education.

As for the marketing of Perl… I honestly don’t think that more than that one line of Perl code has appeared in Linux Format for months if not years. I’m sure the team would welcome a short series if you or someone else could write it.

Nick