Re: [O] Re: Yahoo is moving to PHP ??

[Perrin Harkins]

Tony Bowden wrote:

It sounds like you're saying that you should only use a subset of Perl
as some programmers may not understand the other parts of it?

That is what I'm saying. I'm aware that this is a controversial opinion in the Perl world. However, I think it's reasonable to know your audience and write for them. That's the good part of More Than One Way. The New York Times writes their articles for a certain reading level, and I do the same with my code.

Note that different audiences have different levels. You can expect someone who opens up the code in a module on CPAN to be pretty fearless about advanced Perl ideas. On the other hand, the people in my current office are mostly novices so I try to take it easy on them when writing code for work. I will still use a Schwartzian Transform if I need one, but I'll put in a comment saying "this is a Schwartzian Transform, see such and such URL for an explanation." Same deal with things like hash-slices, and I try to avoid using $_ when it isn't necessary.

Given:
 sub square { $_[0] ** 2 }
 my @nums = (1 .. 10);

Which would say is more readable and maintainable?

1)
 my @squares;
 push @squares, square($_) for @nums;

2)
 my @squares = @nums;
 $_ = square($_) for @squares;

3)
 my @squares = map square($_), @nums;

I'd go for (3) every time.

So would I, in that situation. It's not that map is so evil, but rather that I have often seen people overuse it (especially after a first-reading of "Effective Perl"), and write confusing code with it by jamming too much into the "map { some stuff } @list" form.

- Perrin