Tag: programming

  • A Cautionary Tale

    A Cautionary Tale

    I can never remember exactly how Time::Piece works. But that’s ok because I have documentation. $ perldoc Time::Piece No documentation found for “Time::Piece”. Huh? $perl -v This is perl 5, version 14, subversion 2 (v5.14.2) built for x86_64-linux-thread-multi … $ corelist Time::Piece Time::Piece was first released with perl v5.9.5 $ perl -MTime::Piece -E’say $Time::Piece::VERSION’ Can’t…

  • CGI.pm vs Templates

    I’ve just been involved in a discussion on LinkedIn that I thought deserved a wider audience (I have no idea how well that link works if you’re not a member or or logged in to LinkedIn). A couple of days ago, someone asked for advice on the best way to include HTML in a Perl…

  • How Well Can You Read Documentation?

    (I was going to call this post “How well do you understand context?” but I think this title is more accurate). I just saw someone recommending this code: $reversed = reverse(split //, $string); Looks sensible enough, doesn’t it? But it isn’t. What’s the hidden inefficiency?

  • “You Must Hate Version Control Systems”

    I’ve been an independent consultant for a long time now. Over the last seventeen years I’ve worked for dozens of different clients. In that time it’s been interesting to watch how good practices have slowly permeated the industry. These days, when I start working with a new client there’s about a 50% chance that they…

  • Being Helpful

    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…