Recently in Perl Category

The essentials:

Time: 2009.10.29 6pm

Venue:
Kaledonia Scottish Pub,
1066 Budapest
Mozsár utca 9.

Map: http://bit.ly/talalkozo

If you are in Budapest, if you're interested in Perl and even prefer to have a few nice beers, just show up, it's that easy :)

Did I mention the excellent beer?

In any large deployment sooner or later someone is bound to ask, "why change something that works?".

Sometimes things are a lot simpler than they are assumed to be. In the immortal words of the Joker when asked his proposed solution to a seemingly complex problem, he said: "It's simple. Kill the Batman".

The answer to "why change something that works" is "because you fucking have to!"

At least if you're talking about large scale deployment of software.

The fundamental issue here is that software changes, evolves and doesn't stay static.

The statement "works" is very much relative. You claim it works today within acceptable tolerance, that's all well and dandy. How about tomorrow? Surely the definition of "works" depends on the details and what someone requires of a system changes over time as needs change.


"But my requirements are quite specific and I don't intend to change them!" I hear you saying. The fun part comes from the fact that you're not fully in control of the definition of a working system.

I'm just done with packing for YAPC::EU, tomorrow I'll take a cozy mid-afternoon flight to Lisbon and then the fun starts ;-)

Hopefully I won't get too carried away and I'll have the opportunity to take some pictures for blog's sake...

Can't wait!

Gábor javaslatára ezentúl aki magyar nyelven szeretne Perles és nem Perles témában beszélgetni vagy segítséget kérni, azok számára:

#magyar.pm

Nincs rendszergazdai állásom, nem vagyok netbetyár, és nem rosszul összetákolt shell és cgi szkripteket írok. A világ egyik legszebb és legkifejezőbb nyelvét beszélem, s rajtam kívül még több millióan értik, hogy mire gondolok, amikor azt mondom:

$_="krJhruaesrltre c a cnP,ohet";$_.=$1,print$2while s/(..)(.)//;

A pólómon elfér jópár teljes program, ha konferenciára megyek és szinte már örülök, hogy ha a Javasok összekeverik a sigilt a twigillel. Megvetéssel gondolok a PHPre, a Ruby on Rails sztárolására,  és az összes CPAN nélküli programozóra. Nem szeretem a 20+ soros Hello Wordöket, a szigorú típusosságot, a C-t és a .NETet se. A választott nyelvem hajtja a web felét, mégis azt mondják, elavult nyelvet használok. Szövegmanipulációban mi vagyunk a császárok, és igenis nálunk vannak a világ legjobban tesztelt moduljai. Perl, én így szeretlek.

A while ago I've started using Liferea (a feed reader) after I've realised that I'm spending way too much time just checking websites for new content. It was time to call it web bankruptcy and switch over to feeds.

Things were good for a while, time passed and more and more feeds were added.

Eventually the Ironman challenge launched and I've subscribed to its Atom feed. All seemed fine until some posts appeared as a html tag soup, tags displayed as text instead of actually used.

This is Perl, I should be okay with that, let's fix that bug then - I thought and that's when the fun started.

If the english language Perl community needs some publicity, buzz and marketing that's twice as true for hungarian Perl users. So, as suggested by szabgab++, I'll be blogging partly in hungarian to improve upon this unfortunate situation.

Charts are awesome. Humans are excellent at pattern recognition and that makes charts a very good way to convey information.

There is this old chestnut of wisdom, that Perl programmers shouldn't care about the memory and CPU efficiency of their programs, or to put it differently "if you care about memory and CPU efficiency, use C and write your own garbage collector".

I often wondered about the wisdom of that advice, so one day I've done the opposite and started using Perl for memory, speed and CPU cycle intensive tasks. I don't want to write more C than I can help, I want to use Perl, since I like programming in Perl. So why should I care about speed and memory usage until I have to?

Certain use cases excluded, like embedded programming where memory and CPU power is extremely limited, on mainstream desktop and server hardware it is a good first approximation to start coding in Perl and improve on efficiency as needed. If Perl is your kind of language then avoid the temptation of deciding that Perl can't possibly cut it for high performance environments.