Re: Perl, the new generation

On Wed, May 16, 2001 at 12:49:00PM -0600, Nathan Torkington wrote:
> If you work in a team, then the bar is raised to the union (not the
> intersection) of everyone's knowledge.  But team programming is not
> for small trivial tasks, and if you're solving large complex tasks
> then it's unsurprising that you'd need some of the more advanced
> features of Perl.

In some cases, it's the union.  In other cases, it's the intersection.

I've worked on projects where the N+1st member of a team brings new
techniques that really help everyone's code.

I've also worked on projects where the N+1st member of a team starts
writing idiosyncratic code that no one else can read or debug
(especially when using inheritance and closures).  

It's also amazing how long some people can go without seeing a
statement modifier or non-default delimiters like s{}{};.  In the 
micro view, that's OK.  In the macro view, it leads to Perl Mongers 
meetings that feel more like AA:

	"I've been using Perl for three years, and I'm still a beginner"
	"How does 'open($f, $filename) or die;' work again?"
	"Prototypes?  You mean like C?"
	"I still need to sit down and learn regexes.  They're still confusing."

Z.