On Commenting Out 'use strict;'

[Old_Gray_Bear]

Pardon me

<rant> Yesterday there was a SoPW with a comment from the Querent that the 'use strict' was commented out "for testing".

This morning I get pulled into a code-review where I saw the following:

#! /usr/local/bin/perl
#################################################
# Caused too many errors so I commented it out.
#################################################
# use strict;
# use warnings;

WHAT IS WITH THESE PEOPLE!???????????!!

I did not get up and immediately leave the room; I may have to maintain this Child's code, in the future. So I kept my cool. I asked, relatively mildly, "What kind of errors were you seeing with 'strict' enabled"?

The reply was, and I quote exactly: "You know, name used only once, global symbol requires package reference, things like that. It cluttered up the SYSOUT and made it hard to find the real bugs."

I stared at Him for a good fifteen seconds. Then I got up and left the room.

I just do not get it. Here are two tools that make it **hard** to make stupid coding mistakes, and people complain that the tools are too noisy. And why would strict and warnings be 'too noisy'? It's Because They Are Telling You Something About Your Code; It's Buggy!!!!

What is it with these folks? I don't understand the mind-set that thinks: 'If I turn off error checking and get a clean compile, then the code is ready to push to production'. Phaugh! Likewise Arrgh!

That was two hours ago, and I am still trying to calm down enough so that I can write a serious, reasoned letter to the Child's Keepers and explain why He is never to be allowed any where near any code base I have to support.

Thank you for your patience. I feel better now. </rant>

Update:

In the afternoon, I wandered over to my manager's cube. I explained why I had been so sour all morning. We talked for a bit, and then she said: "I've been looking at that book you brought back from the Con last week (Damian's 'Perl Best Practices'). Did you look at that first appendix? The one with the Lists of Tens? And the second appendix?? I see what you meant when you said that we don't need to write our own Perl coding standards, Dr. Conway already has."

She chatted with her boss, the VP-Engineering, some time later in the day. This morning the VP-Eng wandered by my cube and told me that he had just put in an order at Barnes&Noble for 25 copies of 'Perl Best Practices', and he whats to know if there is a Java equivalent.