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All the Perl that's Practical to Extract and Report
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-- Jarkko Hietaniemi
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Sticking Power (Score:1)
I think many well-versed Perl hackers can agree that using lexical filehandles is better than passing around raw typeglobs, and that
given/whenis better than long chains ofif/elsestatements. I'm pretty sure that most of us can agree that a novice Perl programmer should look to the CPAN to solve common problems.I'm sure that the definition of "modern" will change over the coming years, but I'm also sure that just as we can look at a piece of code which uses global variables (with perhaps a
localor two tRe:Sticking Power (Score:1)
I like the idea of a sort of "Strunk and White" [wikipedia.org] for Perl.
The way I see this project as different in intent from PBP is that it can be less dogmatic about what is "best" (highly contextual and often idiosyncratic) and yet dogmatic enough about what is "good" (generally accepted) to be a reference for minimum standards or expectations.
-- dagolden
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That's a nice metaphor. Do you mind if I borrow it?
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Please do.
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Only if you want all the linguists in the room to huff and go on a rant [upenn.edu] about the “shallow grammar-bossiness and vapid style-mongering” [upenn.edu] of Elements, which therefore seems to be analogous more to PBP than to this Modern Perl endeavour. (I would not want to offend Damian so badly as to say it is directly analogous.)
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If you thought arguments about programming languages were shallow and meaningless, you don't know any academics!
With all due respect to everyone who hates prescriptivism, I'll put on my professional editor hat and say that a gentle dose of Strunk and White could improve the majority of writers with whom I've worked (and anyone who turns into a petty linguistic dictator after reading Orwell was already a petty dictator).
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It’s not like they merely trash Elements without ever suggesting a better alternative [upenn.edu].
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As I'm not British, I'll stick with the The Columbia Guide to Standard American English [amazon.com], thank you. :-)
N.B. It's great fun using it to rebut language pedants at work.