metadoo

• About: I program Perl.

Recent Actions

• Commented on no indirect considered harmful
  Matt, I agree with that: "The problem I'm talking about is that the error messages make it quite difficult to determine what has happened... it's a run-time error - and a relatively inscrutable one". However, my point is that Perl...
• Commented on no indirect considered harmful
  Have read both arguments, so, to not waste the effort, want to return back some of my conclusions (just for the sake of discussion): First, the mst's argument revolves entirely around example that contains circular dependency bug, and this bug...
• Commented on About Perl Grants
  Thanks for the comment. Yes, completely agree with you. It would be better if contributors of money can themselves choose what to spend money on given reasonable options they can chose from. May be this can better direct money to...
• Posted About Perl Grants to metadoo

  The following is my view on the subject (and also first, hopefully not last, blog post here), a comment to About the Grants Committee.

  Whenever someone is about to submit a grant proposal, that…

• Commented on About the Grants Committee
  Whenever someone is to submit a grant proposal, that proposal goes through one's "internal review" first. And in that internal review one asks yourself: "Why should I ask to be paid for what countless of others just CONTRIBUTE to Perl...

Comment Threads

• Ovid commented on no indirect considered harmful

  On a historical note, Ben Evans listed indirect method call syntax as one of the main reasons why he couldn't port Perl to the JVM. It's a huge blocker in terms of alternate implementations, so rather than allowing us to extend the language, it's helping to lock us up in our cell.

  Frankly, I agree with Matt's arguments and I'll throw in one of my own: the more "magic" a language has which makes it hard to read a single line and know what it means, the harder it is to maintain programs writ…

• Joel Berger commented on no indirect considered harmful

  What's wrong with tie (other than being slow)? When its what you need, little else will help: https://metacpan.org/module/Tie::Array::CSV

• Aristotle commented on no indirect considered harmful

  I like being able to not use parentheses far more than I like being able to revert the order of method and invocant.

• Ovid commented on no indirect considered harmful

  Hi Joel,

  The issue with tie is simple: it takes an ordinary variable and suddenly makes it magic. When abused (as it often is), it can make it very, very hard to figure out what is going on. It's also a frequent source of bugs as people (including me before I realized I was barking up the wrong tree) find themselves trying to implement a tied interface and getting it wrong. For example, here's the description of STORESIZE for arrays (from perltie):

  STORESIZE this, count

  Sets the total number of items in the tied array associated with obj…

• Joel Berger commented on no indirect considered harmful

  True you have to be very careful when designing a tied interface, but one ought to be careful when designing an API as well.

  In fact Tie::Array::CSV does implement all the methods, because it inherits from the Tie::Array base class, I have overloaded those which I must or for which I have a better implementation than the default. These base classes make writing those "correct" implementations easier, whether you actually inherit from them, or just inspect their behavior.