Michael J

• About: I blog about Perl.

Recent Actions

• Commented on Variable Names
  new programmers possibly also tend to avoid long variable names because they end up writing them more often than more experienced coders (who will use Perl-isms like 'my $var = fn() or return;' rather than three separate lines for 'my...
• Commented on Directory size calculator
  are you able to install CPAN modules? (if not, then that's a big drawback to learning Perl) searching for 'dir size' finds https://metacpan.org/module/Win32::DirSize which sounds like it might already do this for you...?...
• Commented on Moose and Fatal Type Constraints
  don't you mean George Orwell there, not Aldous Huxley, or is that some reference I'm missing?...
• Commented on use strict;
  There's also a good case for leaving warnings on in production, and ensuring that log files/cron STDERR emails are kept tidy by either fixing code or explicitly ignoring unavoidable warnings from sections of code or noisy modules (PDF::API2 being our...
• Commented on Deploying Perl code with git, local::lib, Minicpan and cpanminus
  Thanks! yes, the system has been working very well for us. Something that I should have mentioned is regarding updating MiniCPAN - I had to delete the CPAN Index files each time before the update, otherwise they were not picked...
• Commented on Deploying Perl code with git, local::lib, Minicpan and cpanminus
  This was a while ago now (last summer), and I'm not sure we looked at Git::Repository, but I do recall git's STDOUT/STDERR mess being a bit of an issue - depending on the command, we sometimes need to parse STDOUT...
• Posted Deploying Perl code with git, local::lib, Minicpan and cpanminus to Michael J

  At $work we're nearing the end of a long upgrade process, that's included moving from Debian etch to lenny, from svk to git, from Perl 5.8 to 5.10, from Apache 1.3 to Apache 2 (and then to Plack), and moving to recent versions of DBIC and…

• Commented on WTF Perl Books
  BetaScript publishing (they also use the name 'AlphaScript') are also publishing Wikipedia content in book form. more info in the comments here: http://www.chrisrand.com/blog/index.php/2010/02/27/odd-tale-alphascript-publishing-betascript-publishing/...
• Commented on DateTime and Excel difference
  I guess it wasn't that simple - keeping 29/02/1900 after importing a Lotus 123 file would make sense, but what about a worksheet created in Excel (with the correct leap year formula) and then exported - would any affected date...
• Commented on DateTime and Excel difference
  The 1900 leap year bug originates from Lotus 123, which either deliberately (to simplify the calculation in limited RAM days) or unintentionally had it wrong. Excel then replicated this in order to import Lotus worksheets......
• Commented on The Definitive Guide to Catalyst book
  Seeing as this book gets recommended everywhere else, I thought I'd offer a contrary opinion - as an existing user of Catalyst, DBIx::Class, etc, I didn't think very much of the book. It's ok (and obviously the authors know what...
• Commented on 4 days at Eth0 Summer 2010
  Any thoughts on how younger programmers get some of these opinions though? I can understand people who maybe used Perl 10 years ago or were starting out with PHP then having these views, but I'd have thought that younger programmers...
• Commented on Syntax highlighting comment keywords in TextMate (TODO, FIXME, etc)
  Thanks, I'd forgotten about that, although have used it a few times in the past. In this though case I just wanted to make them stand out a bit more in comments when actually working on a file, rather than...
• Posted Syntax highlighting comment keywords in TextMate (TODO, FIXME, etc) to Michael J

  mst's State of the Velociraptor talk at YAPC::EU inspired me to start a blog here, although this first post has nothing to do with Perl...

  After reading Chisel's post on highlighting useful words like TODO in Vim…

Comment Threads

• Aristotle commented on use strict;

  For my part, I did explicit say “a case” – and then not even “a good case”. :-) Because there are two sides to that coin, and yes, your argument presents part of the other.

  What I was aiming for though is the contrast that no such case can be made for turning off strictures in production, and a strong case can in fact be made against turning off the refs stricture in particular.

• Ovid commented on Moose and Fatal Type Constraints

  Michael, yeah, that should have been Orwell. Silly me. Nice catch :)

• confuseAcat commented on Directory size calculator

  Well, you are not closing the directory handle that you opened. It works, yes. Because in this case the call to closedir is superfluous. To be totally explicit: you are opening DIR, but you are closing dir.

• yuvaraj commented on Directory size calculator

  Well that's right confuseAcat. I will correct it.

• mrstlee commented on Variable Names

  I'd say there comes a point where the effects of syntactic conventions are rendered practically negligible in comparison with the difficulties in understanding how the observable states in the operational code are related. Any code that does complicated things will require effort to understand irrespective of how it actually appears in your editor.

  For my money if you can figure out the intent of the author (which may of course be yourself a few iterations previously) you at least have a base to explore from. So for me long variable/sub-routine names and voluminous comments might be …