Tag: programming

  • Programming Language Usage

    Back in May, I spent an afternoon at Silicon MilkRoundabout. Silicon MilkRoundabout is a recruitment fair for techies. It’s specifically aimed at people who want to work for start-ups around the Old Street area (although they aren’t particularly stringent about sticking to that – for example, the BBC were there). We were given a booklet…

  • Perl APIs

    For a lot of programmers out there, Perl has become largely invisible. They just never come across it. That might seem strange to you as you sit inside the Perl community echo chamber reading the Perl Ironman or p5p, but try this simple experiment. Think of a web site that you use and that supplies…

  • Misunderstanding Context

    Over the last few days I’ve been involved in a discussion on LinkedIn[1]. It has been interesting as it shows how many people still misunderstand many of the intricacies of context and, in particular, how it ties in with the values returned from subroutines. The original question asked why these two pieces of code acted…

  • Parallel Universe Perl 6

    Last night was the monthly London Perl Mongers social meeting. I hadn’t been for far too long, but I went last night and enjoyed myself. The talk was as varied as it always is, but one conversation in particular got me thinking. We were talking about YAPC Europe and someone asked if I had seen…

  • Unicode and Perl

    Over the last couple of days I’ve been involved in a couple of discussions where it is clear that other people don’t understand how Perl deals with Unicode. The documentation is clear and detailed (there’s even a good tutorial) but for some reason people still persist in misunderstanding it. Here’s a quick quiz. Can you…