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:

Looks sensible enough, doesn’t it? But it isn’t. What’s the hidden inefficiency?

“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 […]

Being Helpful

I like to help people who know less Perl than I do. I like to help them to improve their standard of Perl. I particularly like to help to improve the standard of Perl that is found on random sites on the web. This is because if I find your nasty Perl code on the […]

Programming Like It’s 1999

This article was published yesterday. It shows a way to extract data about a film from IMDB and put it into a local database. Actually, it doesn’t even do that. It produces SQL that you can then run to insert the data. It’s all rather nasty stuff and indicative of the fact that most people […]

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 – […]