On Thu, 5 Apr 2012 11:17:10 +0100 David Cantrell <da...@cantrell.org.uk> wrote:
> On Mon, Mar 26, 2012 at 03:52:37PM -0400, Steve Scaffidi wrote: > > So, recently I ended up having to write a whole lot of shell (bash), > > and it sucked. However, it seemed like a necessity for that task > > because bash (and most other ksh-family shells) has a killer feature - > > process substitution. > > > > cat /some/huge/file \ > > | tee \ > > >(gzip -c /some/huge/file.gz) \ > > >(md5 > /home/huge/file.md5) \ > > >(shasum -a 256 > /home/huge/file.sha) \ > > >/dev/null > > This feature is incredibly useful and one of my favourite tools. > It has recently become one of mine as well. > > At some point I went looking on the CPAN for something that would let > > me do this sort of thing easily in Perl, but sadly, to no avail... > > > > So.. I now have a working implementation! However, I'm not sure about > > the interface/API I've created. > > Nor am I :-) but I'm struggling to come up with something that doesn't > suck horribly. > > > So, I'm looking for comments on the API, and what others would like to > > see. > > I don't think it matters what the API looks like, provided that it's > complete. People who don't like your API can always roll their own > wrapper around it, like what File::Find::Rule does for File::Find. I > can imagine circumstances when I'd want an OO-ish interface and others > when I'd want a functional stylee interface, so I suggest that you write > a nasty old *procedural* interface and then provide Some::Module::OO > and Some::Module::Functional wrappers in the same distribution. Or just > leave those for other people to write, of course. Well, the problem with a procedural interface is that it often becomes impossible to properly instantiate. This is one of the inherent limitations of the File::Find API, which despite its OOP sugar, File::Find::Rule still suffers from. I've written a blog post about this here: http://shlomif-tech.livejournal.com/29315.html (“What you can do with File-Find-Object (that you can't with File::Find)”) So I suggest that the original poster creates a clean OOP interface first that is capable of being instantiated (and won't exhibit any other philosophical limitations that he can think of), and only then prepare some procedural wrappers. I also don't think that Functional Programming and Object-Oriented-Programming are dichotomous, and in Perl 5 and in other languages, you can create APIs that combine both to an even greater advantage. Regards, Shlomi Fish -- ----------------------------------------------------------------- Shlomi Fish http://www.shlomifish.org/ Rethinking CPAN - http://shlom.in/rethinking-cpan We have nothing to fear but fear itself. Fear has nothing to fear but XSLT. Please reply to list if it's a mailing list post - http://shlom.in/reply . _______________________________________________ Boston-pm mailing list Boston-pm@mail.pm.org http://mail.pm.org/mailman/listinfo/boston-pm
