Re: A decade in the Monastery

[talexb]

in reply to A decade in the Monastery

This afternoon I finished making a few changes in my code, including changing a temporary filename into a temporary filehandle. Once the caller and the callee were changed, I ran the tests for that chunk of code, and as expected all tests passed. I celebrated for a microsecond, then got on with the next thing.

Later, a Google searched landed me on PM, and out of habit I read a few nodes, and your post reminded me once again that Perl has an outstanding software engineering framework. Before I became a PM regular, tests were a Software QA thing that didn't involve me. Now, developing code without tests gives me an uneasy feeling, like driving anywhere without my seat-belt fastened.

I know I owe a lot to this terrific community. I'm a way better developer since going to YAPC and joining this group.

And ten years ago I was using a Windows 98 box, editing locally and ftp'ing the files to the Debian server I was developing for, so terrified was I of vim. My latest project is a second NFS server with dual 1T drives. Ten years is a yawning chasm of change.

[dws]

Thanks. I missed that part.

Ten years ago, a project with unit tests was a pleasant anomaly. Now, a project without tests is irresponsible.

That's a huge step forward, and Perl was out ahead of it.