perl hacks / 2010-03-12 09:52:48
It's eighteen months since I wrote "
Why Corporates Hate Perl" and it's worth pointing out that the company I discussed in that article which was dropping Perl in favour of PHP and Java is still employing as many good Perl programmers as it can find.
I talked in that article about some rather unsubtle social engineering that had been going on at that company. Management had started to talk about Perl as a "legacy language" in an attempt to persuade the business that they really don't want their applications written in Perl. That doesn't seem to have been as successful as I feared it would be.
But there's another kind of social engineering that I've seen going on. And this is happening at the developer level. I've lost count of the number of times I've been sitting in meetings with developers, discussing ways to improve the quality of crufty old Perl code when someone throws in the (more than half-serious) suggestion that we should just rewrite the whole thing using Rails or Django.
There seems to be this idea that switching to a new framework in a new language will act as some time of magic bullet and that suddenly all of our problems will be solved. There are so many ways that this perception is flawed, Here are my two favourites.
- The current system is old and crufty not because it's written in Perl, but because it was written by people who didn't understand the business requirements fully, didn't know their tools particularly well or were under pressure to deliver on a timescale that didn't give them time to design the system properly. Often it's a combination of all three. Given the time to rewrite the system from scratch, of course it will be better. But it will be better because the business is better understood and tools and techniques have been improved - not because it's no longer written in Perl.
- Frameworks in other languages are not easier to use or more powerful than frameworks in Perl. Anything that you can do with Rails or Django you can do just as easily with Catalyst. It's using a framework that's the big win here, not the particular framework that you use. Sure, if you're a Ruby house then using a Ruby framework will probably match your existing developers' skills more closely but if your current system is written in Perl then, hopefully, you have a team of people with Perl skills and that's going to be the language you'll want to look at.
I'm tired of Perl being seen as a second-class citizen in the dynamic languages world. I freely admit that there's a lot of bad Perl code out there (I'll even admit to writing some of it) but it's not bad Perl code because it's Perl, it's bad Perl code because it's bad code.
This is what the Perl marketing initiative is for. We need people to know that Perl is not the same language that they stopped using ten years ago. Modern Perl can compete with any of the features of any other dynamic language.
By al means, try to get the time to rewrite your crufty old systems. But rewrite them in Modern Perl. You'll enjoy it and you'll be really productive.
p.s. I should point out that I'm not talking about any specific client here. This is based on conversations that I've had at various companies over the last couple of years and also discussions with many developers in many pubs.
davblog / 2010-03-07 12:21:20
It's been a busy couple of weeks for gigs. On the assumption that at least some of my readers have similar tastes to me, here are brief reviews of the three gigs I've seen in the last couple of weeks.
Fairport Convention, Union Chapel, 20th FebThis is the second year running that I've seen Fairport Convention on their "Wintour" at the Union Chapel. Last year was the first time I had seen them (which is bizarre for a band I've been a fan of for over thirty years). I can't quite put my finger on it, but this year's show wasn't as enjoyable as last year's. I suspect it was down to the number of songs taken from later Fairport albums that I'm not at all familiar with. Oh, and the arrangement of Matty Groves was very strange. The long instrumental that ends the song was unrecognisable.
Thomas Dolby and Friends, Union Chapel, 28th FebSomething a little more up to date. This was Thomas Dolby bringing back together the band who had recorded and toured his second album, The Flat Earth. As an extra twist, the band (who haven't played together for over twenty-five years) didn't rehearse at all. They met on stage and worked the songs out in a two-hour "live rehearsal". They then went of for a brief break before returning to play a half-hour set.
The rehearsal was fun. And the band sounded great for a band eho hadn't played together for so long. There were also a few guest stars - including Trevor Horn who played bass on "Airwaves". The only slight disappointment was that the rehearsal overran so the final set had to be cut short.
John Cale, Royal Festival Hall, 5th MarchI'm not a huge John Cale fan. I generally like the stuff of his that I hear, but I haven't really heard much of it. This concert had him playing the whole of hist album "Paris 1919" (from 1973). This isn't an album that I'd heard at all until I started to listen to it in preparation for this show and it's really not that representative of the rest of his music. But it's a great album and it was interesting to hear it all played live. It is, however, a rather short album (many were back in the early 70s) and that part of the show only lasted forty minutes. After a short break (and it was really short) the band returned to play another forty minutes of "the best of John Cale". I was pretty surprised to realise that I recognised most of these songs. All in all, a great night out.
perl hacks / 2010-03-01 21:56:50
I've got another set of public training courses coming up next month. They will be held at the Imperial Hotel in Russell Square, London.
There are three one-day courses - Introduction to Perl, Intermediate Perl and Advance Perl. They're running on the 13th, 14th and 15th of April.
More details on my
training web site. Hope to see some of you there.
p.s. Gabor has been kind enough to advertise the courses on his newly revamped
CPAN Forum site - so the least I can do is to repay the favour and recommend that you have a look at the site.
davblog / 2010-03-01 15:27:02
When communicating with your customers, it's important to look at the information that you're sending from their point of view. Are they really going to be interested in the information that you send?
Earlier today I finally got round to unsubscribing from the MBNA marketing emails that have been annoying me for months. To confirm my unsubscription they sent me an email which started with this:
We are sorry that you unsubscribed from the newsletter OLB Non Enrolled Non Endorsed 1
Is there really any customer who is going to be even slightly interested in that level of detail? I don't care what your internal name for the newsletter is. I just want to stop seeing it in my inbox.
davblog / 2010-03-01 12:21:37
I don't play the guitar very well at all. I'll sometimes say that I play it better than average, but that's a claim that can only be justified by pointing out that the vast majority of people don't play guitar at all so anyone who knows two or three chords is already well above average.
I have, however, been playing guitar (for some loose definition of the word "playing") for a rather long time. Just how long was brought home to me this weekend.
We're having a lot of building work done in our house over the next few months and as a precursor to that we have had to clear pretty much everything out of the first floor. A lot of stuff has gone into storage, but we also took a lot of stuff to our local tip on Saturday. That load included three guitars and one of them was "The Learning Guitar".
The Learning Guitar was (as its name suggests) the guitar that I first learnt to play on. It was a cheap nylon-stringed Spanish guitar that my parents bought me when I started to take lessons. That was very soon after I started at secondary school in September 1974. There was an after school class which I joined. I think I stopped going after only a couple of months as we were learning boring stuff like "When The Saints Go Marching In" when I wanted to be playing stuff by Slade or David Bowie. At the time I assumed that we weren't learning that stuff because it was too difficult for beginners. Later I realised that a lot of the music I enjoyed was actually just as simple as the stuff we were taught - it was just that the teachers were a bit old-fashioned.
I carried on teaching myself though. I bought a Mel Bay book and spent hours practicising in my bedroom. Of course I had no real idea what I was doing and I picked up a number of bad habits that hamper my playing even now. But I was enjoying myself.
Soon after moving to London to go to university I got another guitar. It was a Fender F3. A much nicer-sounding guitar. My original guitar was somewhat ignored. For a year I shared a flat with someone who played guitar really well and by watching him my playing improved a lot.
But the Learning Guitar still had some life in it. Over the next fifteen or twenty years I took to lending it to friends who wanted to learn guitar. The story was always the same. Someone borrowed it for a couple of years and when they thought the time was right, they'd buy a better guitar and give the Learning Guitar back to me. It was during this period that the guitar acquired its nickname. The last person to borrow it like this was my step-daughter who took it with her when she went to university. As always, i came back after a couple of years.
Over the last ten years, I've played guitar a lot less. I couldn't really justify storing the four guitars that I had cluttering up my study. So this weekend they all went except the Fender. We loaded up a van and took them to the Wandsworth Council dump. Of all of the things that I threw away on Saturday, the Learning Guitar was the thing that I felt most guilty about. I threw it high up on a mountain of rubbish at the dump. At one point I considered trying to retrieve it, but it was too far away.
It was never a particularly good guitar. But a lot of people have strummed their first tentative chords on that guitar. It's a shame to see it go.
Later this week, I hope to get rid of my collection of records. That has sat in a cupboard unused for over ten years. There's really no reason to keep it. But if you think I have got needlessly sentimental about an old guitar, you haven't seen anything yet. I'll be getting far more nostalgic about the records.
