July 2005
Intermediate to advanced
544 pages
13h 8m
English
Content preview from Perl Best PracticesBecome an O’Reilly member and get unlimited access to this title plus top books and audiobooks from O’Reilly and nearly 200 top publishers, thousands of courses curated by job role, 150+ live events each month,
Start your free trial
Chapter 19. Miscellanea
Advice is what we ask for when we already know the answer but wish we didn't.
—
How to Save Your Own Life
This chapter contains a handful of guidelines that do not fit cleanly into any of the previous categories. They cover reasons for revision control, the intricacies of interfacing with other languages, the care and feeding of configuration files, the trouble with tied variables, the complexities of caching, flaws in formats, optimal optimization, and the cunning cruelty of cleverness.
Revision Control
Use a revision control system.
Maintaining control over the creation and modification of your source code[124] is utterly essential for robust team-based development. Just as you wouldn't use an editor without an Undo button or a word processor that can't merge documents, so too you shouldn't use a filesystem you can't rewind, or a development environment that can't integrate the work of many contributors.
Programmers make mistakes, and occasionally those mistakes will be catastrophic. They will reformat the disk with the most recent version of the code. Or they'll mistype an editor macro and write zeros all through the source of a critical core module. Or two developers will unwittingly edit the same file at the same time and half their changes will be lost. Revision control systems can prevent those kinds of problems.
Moreover, occasionally the very best debugging technique is to just give up, stop trying to get yesterday's modifications to work correctly, ...