Perrin Harkins

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• Commented on Is the pro/con "Modern Perl" divide a symptom of Steve Yegge's "software political axis"?
  True, you could read it that way. Avoiding change is a way of avoiding risk. However, the change in this case is all about increasing safety in software terms. Some people would view it as giving up some liberty in...
• Commented on A Fond Farewell to CGI.pm
  I need this bear skin to stay warm while I chisel out web applications with my stone knife....
• Commented on Is the pro/con "Modern Perl" divide a symptom of Steve Yegge's "software political axis"?
  Yes, Modern Perl is a poor description of what the argument has been about. Most of the stuff in your Modern Perl book is totally uncontroversial at this point....
• Commented on Is the pro/con "Modern Perl" divide a symptom of Steve Yegge's "software political axis"?
  Interesting point. I'm not really in agreement about the dependencies being such a problem, but I see how trusting other people's code (in the form of frameworks) could be seen as accepting more risk. The difference between trusting widely used...
• Commented on Is the pro/con "Modern Perl" divide a symptom of Steve Yegge's "software political axis"?
  Thanks for your comment, Paul. FYI, for anyone reading this, pseudo hashes have been removed from Perl starting with 5.10, but the fields pragma does still exist with a different implementation....
• Posted Is the pro/con "Modern Perl" divide a symptom of Steve Yegge's "software political axis"? to Perrin Harkins

  I haven't followed all of it, but the discussions about whether or not the "Modern Perl" tools like Moose are a good thing reminds me of Steve Yegge's essay about the "software political axis." If you haven't read it,…

• Posted A Fond Farewell to CGI.pm to Perrin Harkins

  This text is adapted from a lightning talk delivered at YAPC::NA in Austin, TX on June 4, 2013.

  Alas poor CGI.pm. I knew him, Horatio.

  OK, I admit it: I’ve bashed CGI.pm plenty of times. It’s slower than alternatives (who remembers CGI::Lite?), the HTML generation lo…

• Commented on Installing Oracle's BerkeleyDB and Perl's BerkeleyDB
  Ben, BerkeleyDB and SQLite are totally different animals. SQLite is good if you want to use SQL and don't need high concurrency or extreme speed. BerkeleyDB is good if your data looks like a hash and you need high concurrency...
• Posted All of my conference presentations on slideshare.net to Perrin Harkins

  I may be the last person to do this, but I finally put all of my conference slides, and a few of my presentation notes, on slideshare.net.

  It was fun going through my old slides. I started giving presentations at ApacheCon in 2000, wh…

Comment Threads

• vsespb commented on Is the pro/con "Modern Perl" divide a symptom of Steve Yegge's "software political axis"?

  I disagree about Mo* is lower risk. With given long dependency tail of Mo* and number of opened bugs, it's practical impossible to be sure
  that the code will be deployed to any machine and will work without bugs with all versions of dependencies (including future).

  Also it's pretty risky to code without knowing what's exactly happening one level below your code (unless this level is pretty good tested and documented).

  This is only about Mo* - i.e. frameworks. Not related to use strict, unit tests, etc.
  

• http://www.wgz.org/chromatic/ commented on Is the pro/con "Modern Perl" divide a symptom of Steve Yegge's "software political axis"?

  For me, modern Perl starts with the question of "What should a novice know about programming Perl well in 2013?" For example, maybe Moose makes sense in that novice's environment and maybe it doesn't, but at least he or she knows that it exists and is an option.

• David Shultz commented on Is the pro/con "Modern Perl" divide a symptom of Steve Yegge's "software political axis"?

  And good riddance, those things were ugly!

• David Shultz commented on Is the pro/con "Modern Perl" divide a symptom of Steve Yegge's "software political axis"?

  Here here, they should know about Moo(se), and they should also know about other options. I think part of the issue here is that when myself and others stated they didn't like Moo(se) we were told that either we were mistaken and should look again, or to please be quiet about it so as not to send newbies in the wrong direction. There is no wrong way to do something, that is a long standing very public opinion about Perl.

• shaun.griffith.1964 commented on Is the pro/con "Modern Perl" divide a symptom of Steve Yegge's "software political axis"?

  "With this framing, embracing Modern Perl is indicative of a lower risk-tolerance and a desire for more safety in software development, while objecting to it shows a willingness to accept more risk in exchange for lower overhead."

  Do you have that backwards? Objectors to Modern Perl want the Devil They Know, while embracers prefer to try something else. More like conservatives vs. liberals. Both may think they are going down the low risk path, but have different risk profiles. A safe approach for one is not a safe approach for the other.