Michael Schwern talks about Perl5’s shortcomings, and explains how perl5i can overcome many of them – it is a pragma to fix as much of Perl 5 as possible all at once. While I haven’t worked with perl5i much, I wanted to talk about something Schwern talked about that resonated with me, and that’s the concept of “tribal knowledge.”
Last night, someone posed a problem in #perl-help. They wanted to have syntax highlighting in their shell for Perl code. I immediately suggested that they use Pygments – I knew about it because I’d used it before, and I had experimented with the command line tool. But I was surprised there wasn’t already a Perl solution.
chromatic identified some reasons why it is difficult to hire great Perl programmers, and then followed it up with some advice for hiring managers. They suggest a series of questions every good Perl programmer should be able to answer. I wanted to know how I stacked up.
Load averages are at once hugely simple and hideously complex. Understading what these numbers mean is important for correctly applying this simple indicator of system health.
First, a load average is not CPU percentage. That is simply a snapshot of how often a process was found being executed on the CPU. The load average differs in that it includes all demand for CPU, not just what is currently running.
I’m a Perl guy. I like the language a lot – how it looks, how it works… Even if it isn’t perfect, I like it a lot. But I also love things that work, and Wordpress works.
This essay was originally written in Portuguese, and subsequently translated to English. I rewrote the English version so it reads like an anglophone wrote it.
I understand that some people have problems switching from Windows to linux. Since all my friends keep telling me how great Windows is, I thought I’d try an experiment.