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 […]
Tag: programming
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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“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 […]
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Programming Language Usage
Back in May, I spent an afternoon at Silicon MilkRoundabout. Silicon MilkRoundabout is a recruitment fair for techies. It’s specifically aimed at people who want to work for start-ups around the Old Street area (although they aren’t particularly stringent about sticking to that – for example, the BBC were there). We were given a booklet […]
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Perl APIs
For a lot of programmers out there, Perl has become largely invisible. They just never come across it. That might seem strange to you as you sit inside the Perl community echo chamber reading the Perl Ironman or p5p, but try this simple experiment. Think of a web site that you use and that supplies […]