Re: Goodbye debian

[Cowley Harris <warewolfe@gmail.com>]

>Given the ghastliness of maintaining Perl code

I've had to maintain perl code at work, so you have my sympathies.

 But in Perl's defense, it's not a necessary characteristic of Perl to
be hard to maintain. It's just the inherent flexibility of the
language that makes it easier to write "Write Only Code". Given that
you are refactoring at all shows that, while Perl has the flexibility
to be written in an overly complex way, it can also be written to be
maintainable, even in large projects.

As for the lack of comments in the code, I've read some interesting
opinions about the practice of commenting. That bad comments are worse
than no comments at all, and that comments themselves tend to be the
first victim of code rot.  I've seen some comments in production code,
that if it weren't for the NDA, would have been sent to
www.thedailywtf.com.

 Using self-documenting code practices, sticking to the standards set
out in "Perl Best Practices", and the constant use of Perlcritic has
reduced the amount of comments I've needed to put into code, as well
as the need to maintain the comments. Which, in my opinion, can be
harder than maintaining the code. There are no compile or run time
error or warnings for an out-of-date comment.

One extreme view was that comments in the code should be avoided as
the need to comment was a sign that it was time to refactor of the
code instead.

That said, people who don't put descriptive comments with their
submits need shot. :)

I've got a bit of free time on my hands, perhaps you want some help refactoring?

H.