Monday, October 17, 2005

EuroOSCON 2 - Perl Best Practices

Damian Conway's talk on this subject woke me up.
A lot of great ideas and tips, methinks I need an extra slide at the end of each chapter on style, or something like it. Do you think people will mine a six day course? That's the problem, I keep picking up more stuff to put into the course!

At least I found something to take out - subroutine prototypes.
A packed room, with lots of experts, and it appears I was the only person who understood prototypes (except Damian, of course). That is scary, and probably indicates we sould not spend so much time on them in our course. Damian hates them, I just find them 'flaky' personally - but no more flaky than lots of other parts of Perl. Then again, it is Damian's mission to destroy flaky Perl, and we have to start somewhere...

I got a chance for a brief chat with Mr. Conway (he comes from that country which just lost the ashes), but I have more questions for him. Here is a reminder for me:

Why use -t *STDIN instead of STDIN?
Shouldn't IO::Prompt offer the locale specific Y/N?
An idea for a pragma - RegExp::NoCapture - make all parenth. groups non-capturing. Could REs be optimised better?

Some good speakers tonight - Damian Conway (again) and Larry Wall - really looking forward to that.

BTW - am I grateful for downloading FireFox? The W/Lan here does not work with MS Internet Explorer. Apparently it is the same problem as I mentioned with ActiveState (see below), Or so they say.....

2 comments:

Alina said...

Have you got the ultimate answer to [perl] life, universe and everything yet?
I.E when p6 is out ? ;-))

Clive said...

Not yet, and I don't expect to get it this week anyhow. Some hints, nothing more.

Rest assured I will blog in large letters when I know.