User since: May 18, 2011 at 02:41 UTC Last here: May 24, 2013 at 13:41 UTC (12 hours ago) Experience: 1091 Level: Friar (9) Writeups: 121 Location: Ireland User's localtime: May 25, 2013 at 02:06 UTC Scratchpad: View

I am not really a 'programmer' in the sense it is used here. I studied English and IT for the Humanities and work in publishing. I came across Perl by looking over the shoulder of a programmer who had come in to do our CGI magic. I went and bought a book called "Perl 5 Complete" which was full of errors and drove me mad. The camel arrived just in time.

The only other programming language I have used is HyperTalk (and it's descendant Lingo). I am also familiar with Logo, an educational tool which I came across through the work of Seymour Papert. My early Perl stuff reads like HyperTalk with a few sigils thrown in, and treating the computer like you would a child.

One day my daughter came in, looked over my shoulder at some Perl 4 code, and said, "What is that, swearing?" --Larry Wall

Illuminating facts about Perl: (work in progress)

• PDL Team Members (the people behind just one namespace on CPAN)
• There is no Perl Illuminati

Illuminating perlmonks nodes: (work in progress)

• tobyink's answer to What does "! !" do?

Favourite Larry Wall quote:

Part of what's confusing the issue is that DESTROY is a verb. It was done that way by analogy to FETCH and STORE, but the use of a verb is unfortunate, in retrospect. I should have named it something like YOU_ARE_ABOUT_TO_BE_SHOT_DO_YOU_HAVE_ANY_LAST_WORDS.

Just as an object oriented design will often separate initializers from constructors, it will also separate finalizers from destructors. DESTROY is designed to be a destructor that can call a finalizer, but to confuse it with a finalizer would be, er, confusing.

Bearing in mind I'm no expert, I offer these tips to budding object oriented programmers:

• use parent
• use Object::Tiny
• use Config::Tiny
• learn to roll your own - here's some baccy and some rizzla
• draw diagrams on paper and keep above your monitor
• it's all in the data (which is never quite what you think it is)