Category: Programming
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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?
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“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…
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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…
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Programming Like It’s 1999
This article was published yesterday. It shows a way to extract data about a film from IMDB and put it into a local database. Actually, it doesn’t even do that. It produces SQL that you can then run to insert the data. It’s all rather nasty stuff and indicative of the fact that most people…
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Perl Search Engine
Often on sites like StackOverflow you’ll see questions that people could have answered for themselves if they had just searched the right web sites (usually perldoc or CPAN). But instead, they just went straight for Google and ended up with some dodgy, out of date information that just left them confused. In order to get…