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THE_DAMIEN_PRACTICES

                                February 6, 2007
                                (or earlier, probably)

    Damien Conway
    "Perl Best Practices" (2005)
                                        I'd just read this book
For those not in-the-know:              around the end of last
perl is a computer language             year, but in conversation
that breaks all the rules               with other programmers
for language design laid                about it, I realized I
down by the Computer                    needed to read it again,
Science Intellgensia, and               and this time I went
yet during the early web                through it very carefully.
era, it was proven to be a              And then, I went through
very practical, productive              it one more time after that...
language.


For several years now, there's been a strong
backlash against perl -- it's irregularities
and "ugliness" are supposed to make it too
hard to write readable, maintainable code.

The perl community itself, in fighting back
against this, has tried hard to develop a
culture that encourages good coding
practices (as opposed to the more typical
strategy of using enforcement mechanisms
built into the language).

This book is one part of this battle, an
attempt by one of the insiders of the perl
culture to spell out the Right Way to Do
Things, in a programming language that by
design allows many ways of doing things.

This is an impressive work in many ways,
but looking it over very closely I find
that I have at least slight disagreements          It used to be I was
with a big chunk of it's recommendations.          tremendously impressed
                                                   with Damien modules,
Part of the trouble is that Damien Conway          but now if I learn that
has a reputation as "the mad scientist of          one was written by him
perl", and here he's been called upon to           I approach it with
lay down the boundaries of sanity...               trepidation.

                                                   E.g. they often break
     But then, if the boss told me                 the debugger.
     "we're going to use this book as
     our coding standard" I would
     be overjoyed at having such
     an enlightened employer.


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