Perl Culture

There is a large focus in CA in regard to Perl. Perl, the “Practical Extraction and Report Language” as one of its quasi official name has been rooted in our community since the original website. Perl has prided itself on making difficult things easy and the impossible possible. However for a new Perl programmer, that may be hard to see.

There is a fair bit of compitition to Perl since it first came out. PHP, python and Ruby have all had their places along side however each lacks a certain community and way of life that Perl has.

Common problems that I had were seldom easily solved by a book. For the longest time I was coding Perl like a C coder. Trust me, there is a difference! When I learned about www.perlmonks.org things became much easier. There were well experienced people answering all sorts of questions. The interesting thing as well, is seeing everyone compete for the ‘best answer’. An interesting quote I heard before went like this:

In Perl there are many ways to do it. In delphi you are lucky to find one!

An example of this would be their obfuscation competitions. How many ways can you print “just another perl hacker” can be counted upwards of 300. Here is a collection on CPAN.

Now to just go on there and ask the n00b question, it is fair to say, you will get a response of read the manual once in a while. So looking at the latest documentation is important. Perldoc is a program that comes with your Perl distribution that allows you to read the documentation within the code. There are also release notes and the ‘delta’. The delta is the change log between versions. Sub versions that start with an odd number like 5.10.1 is a release that typically works to fix bugs. Even numbers like 5.10.2 are for feature additions. So there is a lot of good stuff in there. You can find all of this online as well at http://perldoc.perl.org/.

There is one final resource that has helped me get out of many jams in the past. The “Comprehensive Perl Archiving Network” also known as CPAN is a collection of modules developed by the community, free to download and use. There is a module for everything. I seldom come across something that cant be done. Installed with your distribution as well is ‘cpan’ which will allow you to download and install from the site. If you are on activeperl, then the “Perl Package Manager” or ppm is what you need to use to download. Everything is documented and there are even manuals for some of the modules.

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