I've had some problems diving into Perl land, and I'd appreciate your thoughts. While it's obviously very possible to have clean and elegant code in any language (corollary: you can write cobol in any language), I've found that when I'm stuck and I go to Google for a hint, the piece of code I'll end up with will never follow any common style guidelines -- it's always different.
In contrast, Python seems to have more style conventions designed into the syntax and the language, and when I last did much with ruby (pre-rails) it seemed pretty intuitive overall (something about "principle of least surprise").
I don't have much skin in this game: I'm a sysadmin by trade and tend to stick to the traditional Unix tools, but I would like any suggestions you have for people who want to develop good taste in Perl syntax and program design.
I would like any suggestions you have for people who want to develop good taste in Perl syntax and program design.
I've thought about writing a non-insane style guide for Perl, but the more I think about it, the less important I think style is. I can read code regardless of the style, and honestly, a style that's different from mine doesn't slow me down at all.
It's a shame that people think PBP is "the Perl style guide", though, and I'd really like to correct that misconception... but it just doesn't matter at all.
In contrast, Python seems to have more style conventions designed into the syntax and the language, and when I last did much with ruby (pre-rails) it seemed pretty intuitive overall (something about "principle of least surprise").
I don't have much skin in this game: I'm a sysadmin by trade and tend to stick to the traditional Unix tools, but I would like any suggestions you have for people who want to develop good taste in Perl syntax and program design.