Perl Medic: Transforming Legacy Code

Chapter 5. The Disciplined Perl Program

“Lack of discipline leads to frustration and self-loathing.”

— Marie Chapian

The good news about Perl is that you can start typing programs and they pretty much work right away. The bad news is that you can start typing programs . . . Having discovered that this:

print "Hello, World!\n";

is all that it takes to get going, Perl beginners might never find out that they are venturing down a path fraught with risk; they are on the road to Undisciplined Programs, a land where bugs are hard to locate or fix, and revealing your code in public gets sand kicked in your face by the bigger programmers.

Your two greatest ...