use Perl

The slides are available HERE

I should be calling this entry Why Slideshare.net is stupid and I hate it but I'm going to leave that to another time. Instead, I would like to rant a bit on the purpose of Red Flags. You don't have to read this, and you probably won't find this enlightening or even slightly interesting. I just have to vent.

A fellow programmer who attended the lecture wrote in his blog about it, and I couldn't find the energy to reply verbally, so I'll do it here.

The purpose of Red Flags is not to generalize on who is evil and stupid and vile and who is correct and pure and fluffy. The point is to understand practices that usually don't benefit us but rather derive from practices employed in previous jobs, prior experience with different (usually older or drastically different) languages.

This is something that can and should be done in all areas of life, and not just programming. We should always search for what we do because of prior pretenses and reevaluate it and see if there's room for improvement or change. This does not mean that what I would consider a "bad practice" necessarily applies to you and some of the slides do indicate that sometimes you have no other choice but to chose something that.. if you did have another choice, you wouldn't choose.

That person also denounced the lecture as generalization, which "is always bad". I'm sorry, but generalization is not always bad. I generalize people who hit other people when they're drunk as people I do not want to be around when they are drunk. Strict generalization. I also generalize coders who write a 400 line program in one single line as people who don't really want their code to be read, that's a generalization. I also generalize that as a bad coding practice. Yes, I do. There is nothing really wrong with generalization as a way to try and avoid (or at least be cautious around) things that from our experience (or basic understand) might (might) not be good for us. People see generalization as a problem because people generalize the wrong things, but this does not mean we should avoid the quality of generalization. "You shouldn't talk to strangers" is... a generalization, my friend, and it's the first thing you would tell your child.

I have to say I'm deeply disappointed that instead of saying "well, maybe I really should consider avoiding these practices unless I absolutely find the need for it" or saying "this doesn't apply to me, I'm too good of a programmer to listen to this kid", the saying was "he generalizes try and catch for workflow (unless necessary) as a bad practice, and I remember from school that generalizations are bad [I won't stress the point that this is... yet another generalization], so I'm going to say this sucks". Deeply disappointed.

This is exactly the point I don't write in forums, communities, do lectures on programming to a large crowd or engage in conversation with fellow programmers outside my work or social circle (which has about 2 programmers).

</rant>