use Perl

As I wrote in my previous journal entry, I am working on a list of good/best practices.

This is what I have so far, I have plenty of other things, but these might be too Perl specific, so I will save these for later.

So here is my current draft for a list of good practices.

• Keep your subroutines small, for easier test and readability

• Encapsulate complexity for faster understanding and readability. Blackboxes can be skipped at first glance to be revisited later.

• Make your components distributable so they can easily be deployed else and everywhere

• Keep your distributions as small as possible, so you only distribute logically related functionality and not unrelated components, resulting in unwanted side-effects upon deployment and avoid installing unnecessary stuff since later examination of installations can be misleading

• Version everything, distributions, components, documentation etc.

• Make your components environment agnostic, so they can move from development/test/staging/product/whereever without code changes

• Make your components configurable so configuration changes can be made without code changes

• Make your applications environment agnostic so they can be executed everywhere and not necessarily only on designated environments, if not possible make at least sure that the are testable

• Test everything that could possibly break. Do not make assumptions about environment, encoding or execution.
  

I know you have something to add or at least a comment, so please let me know.