I like to help people who know less Perl than I do. I like to help them to improve their standard of Perl. I particularly like to help to improve the standard of Perl that is found on random sites on the web. This is because if I find your nasty Perl code on the internet then someone trying to learn Perl might also find your nasty Perl code and not realise just how nasty it is.

I used to do a lot more of this, but I’ve really cut down. Mainly I have a lot less free time now, but also it used to sometimes get me in trouble. People aren’t always as grateful for help as you’d like to think they would be. Those of you who have known me for ten years or so might remember some amusing scrapes from the support forum for a particular beginners’ Perl/CGI book. The phrase “use strict is gay!” still brings a smile to the face of the older London Perl Mongers.

A few months ago I saw this site. The site is owned by a MySQL consultant who posts some really quite complex programs that he has written to interact with MySQL in various ways. Most of his programs are written in Perl. But it’s clear that the author is not really familiar with Perl – he makes that point explicitly in his sidebar. This means that the Perl really isn’t very good.

Now I know that we’re happy for people to use “baby-talk Perl”. And I know that a correct Perl program is one that gets the job done. But I also think that if you’re sharing code with other people then you should make a bit of an effort to make it as well-written as possible.

So soon after I found the site I dived in with some suggestions. “Try using strict and warnings”, “these days we like to recommend lexical filehandles and three-argument open”, “you know you can avoid those leaning toothpicks” – that kind of thing. I didn’t get much response and the Perl didn’t get any better so I lost interest and drifted away.

Yesterday I got an email from the site saying that someone had added a comment to one of the entries that I had commented on. Reading the new comment I saw my contributions described as “obnoxious”. Following my experiences of ten years ago I’m a little sensitive about accusations like that. I grew up on Usenet and I know that my language can sometimes come across as more robust than I intend. But reading back what I wrote, I don’t think that’s the case here. I tried to explain but was told that I was just making my critic’s point even more valid.

I don’t think I’ll be going back to that site. They don’t seem to be interested in my help. But I left them a parting gift – a link to my version of the program. I doubt they’ll say thank you.