Archive - Originally posted on "The Horse's Mouth" - 2004-10-12 16:00:10 - Graham Ellis
David Cross's talk on Idiomatic Perl was excellent. I know of Dave from his book Data Munging with Perl so I had some idea of what he was going to be covering.
Now - I've been training in Perl for a number of years, so I didn't expect to learn much technically new, but I did expect to pick up nuances, subtleties, and an indication of a truly independent expert's view as to what is good and what is bad practice. Every programming language needs to have good facilities to cover each facet of its use, but Perl it seems has dozens of facilities for each need. And that's not necessarily a good thing because the code can be written in many styles. The trainer / course author, then, needs to be aware of what is common practice and what is being recommended as future common practice, and what should be avoided (and it's nice to know "why" too).
David - if you ever stumble across this, thank you for the talk. A strong reinforcement of some of the paradigms of Perl that I've been pushing, sometimes a little timidly, in our courses. A reminder of some excellent modules which I have neglected of late, but are now so main-line that they're in the Perl core. And a few golden nuggets which, in the spirit of open source I'll be delighted to use in my own work and spread further. Finally, one or two topics / words presented very differently to I present them - and an inspiration to me to vary, just a little, some of my performances.