Programming Perl, 4th Edition

Programmer Efficiency

The half-perfect program that you can run today is better than the fully perfect and pure program that you can run next month. Deal with some temporary ugliness.^[205] Some of these are the antithesis of our advice so far.

• Look on CPAN before you write your own code.

• Look on CPAN again. You probably missed the module you need. Ask around.

• Use defaults.

• Use funky shortcut command-line switches like –a, –n, –p, –s, and –i.

• Use for to mean foreach.

• Run system commands with backticks.

• Use <*> and such.

• Use patterns created at runtime.

• Use *, +, and {} liberally in your patterns.

• Process whole arrays and slurp entire files.

• Use getc.

• Use $`, $&, and $'.

• Don’t check error values on open, since <HANDLE> and print HANDLE will simply behave as no-ops when given an invalid handle.

• Don’t close your files—they’ll be closed on the next open.

• Don’t pass subroutine arguments. Use globals.

• Don’t name your subroutine parameters. You can access them directly as $_[EXPR].

• Use whatever you think of first.

• Get someone else to do the work for you by programming half an implementation and putting it on Github.

^[205] This is also called “technical debt”, but it’s not always a bad thing.