Posts tagged perl

Well, YAPC::NA 2011 in Asheville, NC is over, and I had the opportunity (after getting bumped around more than a couple times) to give a lightning talk as part of the final session. I had previously done a blog post on the subject, but I wanted to share some of my thoughts with a wider audience.

When I wrote 1App::perlhl1 a few weeks ago, I was mostly concerned with getting it working. I picked colours more-or-less at random, and I noted that I planned to tweak them to achieve better readability. I’d like to do some hallway usability testing – if you’re interested, please try cloning my git repository and playing with the branches. master has one colour scheme, and I created colour-2 and colour-3 to test two more schemes. Try them out & let me know what you find most easiest to read. If you want to play with the colouring yourself, I’d be happy to accept whichever one people find best. Thanks!

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.

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.