Just back from teaching Perl in Singapore. The real highlight for me, apart from teaching Perl of course, was the view of the Malaysian jungle on the flight in. The area looks tiny on the map, but it is vast. An amazing place.
I found Singapore to be hot and steamy, and I am talking about the climate. The place has still not shaken off its colonial past. Its own character does come through sometimes, and more power to it. The people seem to be friendly and open without the hang-ups of many large cities. Of course I was only there for a week and I only saw a small part of it.
As usual I looked at scripts that delegates brought in. I have also had a couple of scripts from other people recently. I see very common bad practices regularly:
No use warnings
No use strict
All production scripts should have these set.
Calling subroutines using the & prefix. Why do people do this? Because that is the way we used to do it in perl 4, and people do not update their skills. The & prefix ignores prototype checking, and passes the current value of @_ into the call if no other argument is specified. Don't do it!
Calling external programs instead of Perl built-ins. I have seen `date` used instead of localtime(), `cd $dir`, `pwd`, `mkdir`, `rm`, `egrep`, and so on. This is not just lazy, it is grossly inefficient. It is also a security risk, by the way. I published a list of UNIX commands and perl equivalents, I will try and update it soon.
Tuesday, July 10, 2007
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