master perl

Well no. Not really. But after some 10 years using Perl nearly every day, I would say that I have reached a certain comfortable threshold where I can pick and choose what I want to learn next.

Am amazed at how long it didn’t take me. This is one powerful language!

I’ve been messing with Pugs, and I gotta admit – being able to sit down and mess directly with a Perl 6 implementation is doing a lot to make me relax about the future of Perl.

Take a gander at this one

my $thingy = new Thingy->new();

Took me 20 minutes to see the double new calls with that line jumbled into a few thousand others.

I’ve been working on some contract code, and I seem to have hit through some sort of barrier where I love Perl again. Maybe it’s just the medication talking, but I’ve been writing enough code that I’ve started dreaming in Perl again. Now for the non-geeks (and non-Perl geeks) this is a frightening concept. Don’t worry, they aren’t anything freaky. Just every once in a while my brain takes a break from those mysterious dreams about flying and trains going into caves to ponder some tricky issue I’d been facing that day. Woke up today wanting to see what I could do with perl2exe to make apps for friends and family, instead of just work-related stuff.

Anyways, please excuse me while I reapply for a job that I looked at a month and a half ago. It still seems to be open, and these guys have the serious Perl fetish going as well.

The more I use Perl, the more I wish I was using Ruby. Still, it’s far from the worst choice. I am just looking forward to when I get clients who can support Ruby on Rails. I’m not enough of a big shot developer that I can dictate toolkits and languages just yet. Maybe someday, but I don’t think I can today.

I was asked when I was starting at my new job whether I would ever get bored of Perl. I replied that there were so many interesting nooks and crannies and different ways of getting things done in Perl that I don’t think it would be possible for me to be bored by the language. My answer was honest, but maybe a little incomplete. No, I’ve never been bored by Perl, but goodness knows I’ve been frustrated, rattled, and confused by it on occasion. And some of the code that folks write … man some of that code makes me angry.

But I’ve been doing non-Perl stuff at work for a couple months now, and that has been boring. Sheesh. Excuse me, my brain is leaking out my ears from boredom. I need to push it back in, plug it up, and get back to work.

Here’s something I learned the other day while rereading Learning Perl 3rd Ed. The glob operator doesn’t spawn a new process or invoke the shell or anything expensive like that anymore, so you can actually build directory content listings in a manner that makes sense!

my @images = glob "*.jpg";

... or even the operator version, which I can’t get to display properly for some reason.

Of course, you still want File::Find for recursive trips. Still, this is good to know for basic stuff.

Heck, I barely even know what it means to “master Perl.” It has so many nooks and crannies and dark magical corners that it’s rumored even Larry Wall isn’t completely certain about all of them. Still, some folks do seem to do a fair job of mastering their little corners. I just want to get better, that’s all. Seems like there is still quite a bit more I could be doing with the language.