No Perl For You

| | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)
At work, I had to defend my use of Perl and swear not to check any into the build tree, no matter how useful. This is a decided shame since I am effective with it.

I understand my peer's take on this; we've all been bitten by having to maintain something that is a pain-in-the-ass to read. Perl syntax is a little weird to those not steeped in it. And it did take a few years to get the hang of non-module, shell script-style development with it. Finding a Perl GUI debugger really flipped the switch for me.

Anyways, it reminded me of a few good things we used to do at my last job;
  1. Always check in and use the checked in headers, libs, and tools in the build (including the Perl interpreter)
    • This kept us from having everyone have to install the right versions of things, and guaranteed that a user sync'd to head could build
    • This is in opposition to relying on the user's local environment and installed SDKs to be up-to-date.
  2. Check your calendar and show up to meetings you were called to.
    • Setting development policy minus attendees never works. Good reason to have a wiki or versioned word doc.
  3. Have and stick to core hours for the developers so they can be relied on to be there when you need them.
The good news? I had to learn some C# and windows .NET widgets. I got my own seat of vc7 so I don't have to nag engineers for things I can figure out myself. I got to break my old habits, really. And I got to break some of theirs by checking in a Perl script that proves useful. Yay.

0 TrackBacks

Listed below are links to blogs that reference this entry: No Perl For You.

TrackBack URL for this entry: http://skull.piratehaven.org/~epu/mt/mt-tb.cgi/109

Leave a comment

Recent Tweets