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, […]
Tag: programming
A Cautionary Tale
I can never remember exactly how Time::Piece works. But that’s ok because I have documentation.
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$ perldoc Time::Piece No documentation found for "Time::Piece". |
Huh?
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$perl -v This is perl 5, version 14, subversion 2 (v5.14.2) built for x86_64-linux-thread-multi ... $ corelist Time::Piece Time::Piece was first released with perl v5.9.5 $ perl -MTime::Piece -E'say $Time::Piece::VERSION' Can't locate Time/Piece.pm in @INC (@INC contains: /usr/local/lib64/perl5 /usr/local/share/perl5 /usr/lib64/perl5/vendor_perl /usr/share/perl5/vendor_perl /usr/lib64/perl5 /usr/share/perl5 .). BEGIN failed--compilation aborted. |
So Time::Piece has been in the Perl core since 5.9.5. I’m running Perl 5.14.2 but I don’t have Time::Piece installed. After ten minutes or so of head-scratching it came to me.
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$ sudo yum install perl-core Loaded plugins: langpacks, local, presto, refresh-packagekit [ stuff snipped ] ---> Package perl-Time-Piece.x86_64 0:1.20.1-212.fc17 will be installed [ more stuff snipped] |
I’m running Fedora. The Fedora […]
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CGI.pm vs Templates
I’ve just been involved in a discussion on LinkedIn that I thought deserved a wider audience (I have no idea how well that link works if you’re not a member or or logged in to LinkedIn). A couple of days ago, someone asked for advice on the best way to include HTML in a Perl […]
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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:
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$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 […]