Give Me MetaCPAN

Ever since MetaCPAN launched I’ve been getting increasingly irritated with people who still use links to search.cpan.org. Isn’t it obvious that MetaCPAN is better? Why do people still insist on sharing links to the older site? Of course they do it for various reasons. Perhaps they aren’t as in touch with the modern Perl world […]

Why Corporates Hate Perl

This is a reprint of an old blog post. A few years ago I was writing blog posts (semi-)regularly for O’Reilly. This is the one that probably got the most feedback. I’m reprinting it now because a) it’s pretty hard to find on the O’Reilly site and b) it’s relevant to a couple of conversations […]

DBIC vs DBI

Three times in the last few months I’ve had the “DBIC or raw DBI” discussion. People have told me that they don’t use DBIC because raw DBI is better. And each time, the person promoting DBI in the discussion has used an argument that boils down to “DBIC is probably useful for people who don’t […]

Learning from Bad Code

I’ve written before about Linux Format’s habit of sharing badly written Perl code. I thought things were improving, but in the new edition (November 2012, issue 163) they’re back to their old tricks. This time it’s a tutorial called “Starfield: Learn new languages”. In this tutorial Mike Saunders writes similar starfield simulation code in C, […]

A Cautionary Tale

I can never remember exactly how Time::Piece works. But that’s ok because I have documentation.

Huh?

So Time::Piece has been in the Perl core since 5.9.5. I’m running Perl 5.14.2 but I don’t have Time::Piece installed. After ten minutes or so of head-scratching it came to me.

I’m running Fedora. The Fedora […]