Russel's Havens
  • Home
  • Log Analysis
  • Blog of Time

Work time: Into Perl

11/2/2011

0 Comments

 
Ah, Perl.  That uber-powerful, loved and hated scripting language of *nix hackers around the world.  With it, you can put the entire DVD decryption algorithm on the front of a T-shirt.  With it, you can easily write code that nobody can understand, including you 3 months later.
This is definitely a language that follows in C's mindset: "Here's all the rope you need...."  Having spent much of my professional programming time maintaining others' code, including hacking in authentication features to a Twiki instance, I always approach Perl with caution and care.  After all, that thing is loaded.  There are weird punctuation and non-alphanumerics all over the place and more implicit variables and quirky one-off idioms than you can shake a stick at.  And because there's more than one way to do it, no two web pages with sample code are even similar.  
That experience has led me to Python, with its "there should be one -- and preferably only one --obvious way to do it" and emphasis on code readability.  And I still hold by that mindset.  The battle cry of the anti-Python folks seems to be "Two words: 'significant whitespace'."  For me (and for many designers, interestingly) whitespace was always significant -- I think in outlines and my pseudo-code has indentations all over every whiteboard I use -- and did long before I started using Python.
Nevertheless, I am nothing if not a curiosity-driven polyglot.  So with a significant Nagios development effort in front of me, it was time to make peace with Perl.
And so, after a few weeks of intensive coding, I feel I have turned a corner.  I'm enjoying my Perl coding -- reference types and sigils and the hopelessly unfocused user community notwithstanding.  It's just fun to become productive in another language.  In the coming months I hope to become more comfortable with the many, many idiomatic eccentricities of the language.  So, with that attitude: Tally ho!
0 Comments



Leave a Reply.

    Author

    Russel is a senior career IT guy and relatively new manager with an academic interest in log management and log data analysis, a professional interest in monitoring and management systems. database management, and programming languages, and personal interests in family, photography, reading, and the outdoors.

    Archives

    January 2023
    August 2022
    February 2022
    January 2022
    November 2021
    October 2021
    February 2021
    January 2021
    December 2020
    August 2020
    July 2020
    July 2018
    October 2017
    September 2017
    July 2017
    January 2017
    December 2016
    July 2016
    January 2016
    September 2015
    July 2014
    April 2014
    July 2013
    June 2013
    December 2012
    August 2012
    July 2012
    May 2012
    January 2012
    December 2011
    November 2011
    October 2011
    September 2011

    Categories

    All
    Academic
    Aws
    Family
    Gratitude
    Home
    Language
    Reading
    Travel
    Work

    View my profile on LinkedIn

    RSS Feed

Powered by Create your own unique website with customizable templates.