While at the Italian Perl Workshop I was talking with a gentleman who does a lot of contract work (and gave me permission to anonymously share this story). Most of his contract work deals with the Web and he's fortunate enough to have worked with quite a few companies who are a bit more sophisticated than the old CGI.pm days. In fact, some of them use Mojolicious, an excellent Web framework that many developers are enjoying. Mojolicious is fast, flexible, robust, and has no CPAN dependencies.

This developer hates working for clients who use Mojolicious. I confess that I was surprised when I found out why. It's an exercise in "unintended consequences".

Sitting here in the Italian Perl Workshop and have been enjoying the talks and the excellent food. I was thinking about Matt Trout's Data::Query talk from yesterday. In a nutshell, Data::Query lets you write things like this:

SELECT { $_->cd->name }
  FROM { $_->cds, AS 'cd' }
  JOIN { $_->artists, AS 'artist' }
    ON { $_->cd->artistid eq $_->artist->id }
 WHERE { $_->artist->age > 25 }

This is very exciting, though it might not be immediately evident why.

For those who love Perl (or are willing to learn) and would love to travel the world, there's a company in Malaysia waving work permits at you.

Please note: the following was done as an exercise in intellectual curiosity and not in any way an example of a real optimization. Any comments about "premature optimization" will be downvoted as soon as we get a voting system ;)

We're deep in the heart of micro-optimizing some extremely performance-intensive code when I stumbled across this:

if ( $number == -1 ) {
    # do something
}

Clearly a numeric comparison isn't expensive and I managed to find a few areas where we could improve some performance, but out of curiosity, I decided to benchmark $number == -1. The -1 is returned if a function failed (because throwing an exception would be far too expensive here) and we test for that. In reality, we only care if the number is less than 0. I was mildly curious to know if I could get a tiny performance increase in bit comparison (again, this was curiosity only. If I have to get this deep in optimization, I have more serious issues than this).