Re: On Commenting Out 'use strict;'

[steelrose]

in reply to On Commenting Out 'use strict;'

In my experience, this problem is generally caused by someone "picking up" Perl as they go along, rather than actually reading a book, or taking a class, or anything "formal". They simply think that by commenting out the command, since the errors aren't reported, they don't exist.

Far too many programmers are falling into this type of bad programming, either from their own want to take shortcuts, or by pressures put on them by management to maintain code in languages they aren't trained in. In either case, the programmer needs to be made aware of the consequences and shown the "light". Generally speaking, once they are aware, they conform. If they don't, then that's another situation entirely.

[bofh_of_oz]

I would tend to disagree. I am pretty much "picking up" Perl as I go along, and I never took any Perl classes or finished reading a Perl book (yes, I started reading it, but never finished. However, I've been coding in different languages for last 15 years, and hope I understand the value of commenting/testing my code. So, when I was learning Perl, and I just found out about "use strict", I have this option in every one of my scripts - especially in production (even though someone here in PM told me I don't need it in production as the bugs were fixed in dev/testing phase).

In my opinion, it is the people who don't care about the result of their work or just can't think logically would comment out "use strict".

And I agree with you that such people should be educated. I usually say to them "If I place a high-voltage transformer box here, all warning labels from it, and make you maintain it - would you do it, and how comfortable would you feel?". There's nothing like real-life examples...

[steelrose]

I would only point out that you are an exception to the rule, in my experience that is.