Archive for November, 2010

Linking to CPAN

Saturday, November 27th, 2010

All through these blog pages, I’ve been linking to CPAN modules I’m talking about so that it’s easy for readers to find them.  I knew I was linking to specific versions, but couldn’t figure out how to link to the latest version of the module.  I noticed the docs for Task::Kensho do it, and am going to start doing it too.

The secret is to use links like this:  http://search.cpan.org/perldoc?Task%3A%3AKensho

The %3A are the URI encoding of a : so this goes to http://search.cpan.org/perldoc and searches for the module name automatically.  Neat.

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Posted in Perl | 6 Comments »

Shiny New Perl – Modern Perl!

Saturday, November 20th, 2010

I wrote a post last week talking about how outdated a lot of Perl seems to be, and the comments were full of people discussing it.  One of the things mentioned repeatedly was chromatic‘s new book Modern Perl.  I had seen several of the posts where he discussed the book on his blog and knew it was coming, but it was news to me that it was released

Not only is it released, but chromatic has graciously made the book available  for download as PDF.  His publisher has it as both letter-sized and A4 sized formats for print.  It’s released under one of the Creative Commons (by-nc-nd) licenses so you can use it, share it, and distribute it freely and widely.  The blog announcement mentioned above encourages you to do so. (more…)

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Posted in Perl | 4 Comments »

Ugly Old Perl

Saturday, November 13th, 2010

I work as a professional Perl developer.  We have a large and complex system which is built around a lot of Perl.  This system has been in use and in place for years, and handles an astonishing amount of load, using thousands of computers to do it.

I work with some excellent engineers, who are thoughtful, intelligent, hard-working folks.  They want to make the best system they can, and they want it to be reliable and dependable.  I have great co-workers.

I keep finding Perl that looks like it was written in 1990.   I find code like this: (more…)

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Posted in Perl | 45 Comments »