Perl Best Practices

Chapter 1. Best Practices

We do not all have to write like Faulkner, or program like Dijkstra. I will gladly tell people what my programming style is, and I will even tell them where I think their own style is unclear or makes me jump through mental hoops. But I do this as a fellow programmer, not as the Perl god … stylistic limits should be self-imposed, or at most policed by consensus among your buddies.

—Larry Wall Natural Language Principles in Perl

Code matters. Analysis, design, decomposition, algorithms, data structures, and control flow mean nothing until they are made real, given form and power in the statements of some programming language. It is code that allows abstractions and ideas to control the physical world, that enables mathematical procedures to govern real-world processes, that converts data into information and information into knowledge.

Code matters. So the way in which you code matters too. Every programmer has a unique approach to writing software; a unique coding style. Programmers' styles are based on their earliest experiences in programming—the linguistic idiosyncrasies of their first languages, the way in which code was presented in their initial textbooks, and the stylistic prejudices of their early instructors. That style will develop and change as the programmer's experience and skills increase. Indeed, most programmers' style is really just a collection of coding habits that have evolved in response to the opportunities and pressures they have experienced ...