I’ve had this discussion several times recently, so I thought it was worth writing a blog post so that I have somewhere to point people the next time it comes up. Using ampersands on subroutine calls (&my_sub or &my_sub(…)) is never necessary and can have potentially surprising side-effects. It should, therefore, never be used and […]
Category: Programming
Modern Perl Articles
Back in 2011 I wrote a series of three articles about “Modern Perl” for Linux Format. Although I mentioned all three articles here as they were published, I didn’t post the actual contents of the articles as I wasn’t sure about the copyright situation. But now I suspect that enough time has passed that copyright […]
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Dev Assistant
A couple of days ago, I updated to my laptop to Fedora 21. One of the new features was an application called DevAssistant which claimed that: It does not matter if you only recently discovered the world of software development, or if you have been coding for two decades, there’s always something DevAssistant can do […]
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Perl’s Problems
It’s been over six weeks since I wrote my blog post on Perl usage. I really didn’t mean to leave it so long to write the follow-up. But real life intervened and I haven’t had time for much blogging. That’s still the case (I should be writing a talk right now) but I thought it […]
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“I Do Not Want To Use Any Modules”
Almost every day on the Perl groups on LinkedIn (or Facebook, or StackOverflow, or somewhere like that) I see a question that includes the restriction “I do not want to use any modules”. There was one on LinkedIn yesterday. He wanted to create a MIME message to pass to sendmail, but he didn’t want to install […]