Tom M

• Website: search.cpan.org/~team
• About: hello

Recent Actions

• Commented on Newbie Poison
  Is silence better than an undiplomatic response? Silence is better than any response that isn't nice, honest, and helpful. That's fair enough, hopefully we can agree to disagree on this point. I saw some unpleasant behavior, called it out,...
• Commented on Newbie Poison
  (tl;dr I think I'm just repeating here what genehack already said, and I'd defer to his experience anyway) A few years ago I might would have agreed with you. I unconsciously imagined newbies as thick skinned, confident, male, Caucasian, autodidacts...
• Commented on Newbie Poison
  Context is probably important here, particularly given the mention of previous advice. So, that CPU one seems to be: http://www.nntp.perl.org/group/perl.beginners/2016/06/msg126040.html I wouldn't have included that particular sentence, but it's a valid question in the absence of further information: newer isn't...
• Commented on Missing Smart Match
  if( $scalar ~~ @array ) { } You're missing at least one line: use experimental qw(smartmatch); at which point you might as well use something more predictable, such as the contains() example above, or elem() from Data::Munge: use Data::Munge qw(elem);...
• Commented on Virtual Spring Cleaning (part 9 of X) wherein I retrieve content
  Good to see more people using Futures. There's a couple of existing distributions which already provide Future-based wrappers around a few HTTP clients: Net::Async::Webservice::Common WebService-Async-UserAgent (currently just Net::Async::HTTP, LWP, Mojolicious) Neither of these is suitable as a truly generic HTTP...
• Commented on Christmas Came, Bah Humbug
  the average JS programmer produces worse results than the average programmer from any other dynamic language (e.g. Ruby or Perl) But there are many more JS programmers around. I expect the ratio in Perl was similar a decade ago. I...

Comment Threads

• mauke commented on Newbie Poison

  This whole post looks unpleasant.

  > Many won't even concede that the behavior I called out was unpleasant in the first place.

  This sounds like "Many people disagree with me, how dare they" to me. (I'm one of them.)

  - "Condescending, abusive advice"
  - "So come on in newbies. You're stupid. You fill us with contempt. Get ready to complain. And most of all, don't waste our precious time."
  - "antique, pompous, and arrogant elitists who can't even treat each other with kindness and respect"

  Isn't all of this condescending, abusive advice itself?

• Graham Knop commented on Missing Smart Match

  I don't find

  $x in @a

  very comprehensible because it isn't obvious how it will be comparing elements. Will it use string equality or numeric equality? What if you need to pick one or the other?

• Flavio Poletti commented on Missing Smart Match

  Didn't know about Syntax::Keyword::Junction, that's what you get when you stop to the first module that fits the requirements :). It would be good to have some hint in the Perl6::Junctions docs, anyway, because it seems "more popular" with two reviews and a few more ++'s. Maybe even a new comment would do the trick?

  The new subs in List::Util are OK but they (understandably) follow the syntax of the rest, which is less sugary. This seemed to be an important point in the OP. How much sugar you like is a matter of taste, of course.

  I agree with Graham Knop and I consider any(…

• Aaron Priven commented on Missing Smart Match

  $x in @m and $y ~> @n are analogous to and just as comprehensible as $x eq $m and $y == $n.

• Duncan White commented on Newbie Poison

  Like others, I think you were a bit harsh picking out the "what CPU" question, that response seems clear simple and polite to me.

  But I do agree that the "bad practices" second answer was rather snotty and unhelpful - especially saying that the OP's code had several bad practices but not bothering to clearly explain: which specific bad practices he had in mind. Maybe the commentator had had a bad day?

  More generally, I completely agree that we should take the time to reply helpfully and politely on various Perl beginner forums.