Monday, June 29, 2009

Yet Another Perl Blog

Ho look. It's a "mission statement". Why is this blog here? Welp. This blog is here for a couple of reasons. First, perl is this crazy annoying unique wonderful language. It's a programming language with what I can only call slang. It's got more tribal knowledge and cultural nuance than anything else I've ever worked in, for good and ill. It's got interest, flexibility power, and, quite notoriously, enough rope to hang oneself on. Perl creates a fascinating meta-problem. (I'm all about fabulous meta problems.) How do you learn a really rich and nuanced language quickly and well?

I must've picked up and put down perl at least 4 times over the years. I'll ramp up, do a medium sized object oriented project and then put it down again and not program with it for months until I'm forced to actually maintain the stuff I wrote at which time I'm reviewing dereferencing syntax yet again. I'm spending a stupid amount of time re-learning things. And THIS leaves me wondering how to do it each time a little better and a little faster.

This blog is flatly not for the 4000 cpan contributors in the world. This is for people who have to learn perl and are drowning the "There's More than One Way to do It" philosophy. This blog is for people who maybe heard about Modern Perl, Enlightened Perl, and perl5i and wonder why the heck they'd want to use any of them (and maybe you don't). This blog is for people who have never dropped into irc to ask for help and think if they did mst might eat them. This is also very definitely for people who have no idea who mst is.

Speaking of said surly bastard, I refuse on general principle to admit to myself that I might actually be doing this to participate in his iron man challenge. I'm hanging on to my delusions that I did this without a kick in the pants. I've thought about doing this for over a year. But I'll be trying hard to update it weekly.

So this is first post. Welcome people. It's Yet Another Perl Blog. Which, if you work in perl, you'll know is just about the most boring and uncreative blog name EVER.