Re^2: Request for Comments on Perl::Critic

[friedo]

PBP is a great book and while I have nothing but immense respect for TheDamian, I think he goes a little off the deep end in parts of it. When reading it, I found that about 80% of it consisted of things I already do, 15% consisted of things that might be a good idea, and 5% consisted of things that made me say, "What the hell is this nutcase thinking?!"

But that's OK. Nobody agrees on coding standards, and in Perl especially, because there's a million ways to do everything. I like to think my code is clean, abstract, modular and well-organized, but I'm sure Damian would be horrified by some of my decisions. ("Oh no! friedo uses unless all over the place! He must be a drooling mental patient!) You get the idea.

That said, I don't think PBP is a good baseline to use for a code critic. A lot of the reccomendations are somewhat superficial, whereas a code critic should look primarily at dangerous constructs. (Non-use of strict, indirect method invocation, accidental autovivification, symrefs, overly complicated conditionals, etc.)