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 But instead, they just went straight for Google and ended up with some dodgy, out of date information that just left them confused.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 […]
Category: Programming
Context
This generated a lot of discussion in a training course that I ran this week so I thought it was worth sharing more widely. I think you can say that you understand the concept of context in Perl if you know what these four statements will print and (more importantly) can explain why they don’t […]
Too Easy or Too Hard
We hear a lot of people complaining that programming in Perl is too difficult, but I think that a lot of these problems stem from people making the opposite assumption – that writing Perl is easier than it actually is. Let me share a couple of examples. I’ve lightly disguised the companies in question – […]
Crufty Old Perl
It’s eighteen months since I wrote “Why Corporates Hate Perl” and it’s worth pointing out that the company I discussed in that article which was dropping Perl in favour of PHP and Java is still employing as many good Perl programmers as it can find. I talked in that article about some rather unsubtle social […]
A Subway Metaphor
Many years ago I read a science fiction story which has always stayed with me – although I’m buggered if I can remember the title or the author. It was set in the not too distant future. Another new line was about to be opened on the New York City Subway [In the comments Rozallin […]