Perl Debugged

3.5. Developing

There's no substitute for knowledge. Coding something you don't understand should set off warning bells in your brain: “What does the code I just wrote really do?” That's the time to experiment.

I have seen too many people take a shotgun approach to coding: they just fire a blast of characters onto the screen and rearrange them until something works. Too often, instructors foster the mindset that the only thing that counts is getting the right answer: I keep finding people who put something in a program “because it works”—in that particular situation—but don't understand what they are doing and so can't extend it to other situations ...