Re: Current Issues with perlipc.pod - should they be fixed?

On Monday 06 December 2010 19:49:44 Abigail wrote:
> On Mon, Dec 06, 2010 at 07:34:35PM +0200, Shlomi Fish wrote:
> > Now I think that some of my style/best-practices suggestions are an
> > improvement and I'd like to pursue them.
> 
> And I'm strongly against that sentiment.
> 
> I really do think p5p, and hence the documentation, should *not* have a
> style preference, or have some form of "best practice" (nor do I believe
> you'll find consensus on what "best practice" will be). Style guides,
> coding standards, best practices, or whatever you want to label it only
> gives rise to coding police, and it's only fuel to people who only answer
> questions on usenet or Perlmonks with "well, for starters following these
> as these rules", regardless whether that helps answering the question
> or not.

Well, I don't frequent either Usenet or Perlmonks, but let me answer. (For the 
record, I help a lot on IRC and on mailing lists.) I've collected a longish 
list of bad practices to avoid (from PBP and other sources) here:

http://perl-begin.org/tutorials/bad-elements/

Now, I've specifically tried to make it as non-controversial as possible and 
avoided recommendations that are a matter of taste, and can be done this way 
or another.

If you think all style guide / best practices / etc. are not helpful, will you 
accept code that:

1. Lacks all indentation?

2. Has magic numbers such as:

	my $n = uc($_[3]);

?

3. Has comments or even identifiers in a non-English language?

4. Has duplicate code?

5. Has inconsistent tabs and spaces and looks differently aligned on many tab 
widths?

6. Has non-descriptive variable names? Reportedly 
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Daniel_J._Bernstein uses many single-letter and 
double-letter identifiers in his code.

---------------------

I know none of these will be acceptible to me, because they are not a matter 
of taste, but rather objective measures of the internal quality of the code. 

However, there are a lot of style debates, like which indentation style to 
use, or whether to do my ($self, $args) = @_; or my ($self, %args) = @_; or 
whether one should avoid using "unless" instead of of "if (!)" altogether 
(which I do), or whether one should avoid trailing conditionals (which I also 
avoid), etc. etc. These are still a matter of preference and mostly amoral, 
and are not covered in my document. 

Now the question is which category making the code strict-safe or using 
lexical filehandles belongs to. People have given good arguments for both of 
these for many years now, so I think they belong in the things that p5p will 
necessitate in code examples (unless someone has a compelling argument why 
they are not a good idea).

Regards,

	Shlomi Fish

> 
> Pursue all you want. Just expect feedback which may not agree with you.
> 
> 
> 
> Abigail

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Shlomi Fish       http://www.shlomifish.org/
Rethinking CPAN - http://shlom.in/rethinking-cpan

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