Get sophisticated
Ruby’s primitives (Strings, Hashes, Arrays, Numbers – anything that has a literal syntax) are fine things. But that doesn’t mean you should use them everywhere. You’re often much better off wrapping...
View ArticleJavascript heresy
So, remind me, what’s the rationale for always using the optional ; when you’re writing Javascript? The only reasons I can think of, off the top of my head are, “Because you’ll break minifiers without...
View ArticleWarnings are the new test failures
Have you ever tried to run Rails, Rspec, Rake or, for that matter almost any Ruby library or application that you’ve ever heard of with the -w flag? How about running Rails with taint checking on?They...
View ArticleMarking time...
So, it turns out that there’s a recording of my MooseX::Declare talk at the London.pm techmeet last night. And, on listening to it, I sound rather less incoherent than I thought I did while I was...
View ArticlePerl: Test Infected since 1987
Here’s something interesting. This is the test directory from the very first version of Perl, released in 1987 and described by Larry as ‘a “replacement” for awk and sed’. Day one of Perl, and we...
View ArticleWriting parsers for fun and convenience
One aspect of coming back to Perl for ‘recreational’ programming is that if, like me, you’ve declared war on @_ and boilerplate code, then testing can be somewhat trying. The Perl testing framework...
View ArticleLondon.pm Presentation Video
Back in (crikey) February, I gave a talk at the London Perl Mongers’ technical meeting about Moose for Ruby Programmers and wrote it up here. Mike Whittaker was in the front row of the audience with...
View ArticleTwice now
In Ruby, when you’re doing division on integers, things can get a little counter intuitive. For instance, 6/4 is obviously 1. At least, it is until you decide that you’d rather have numbers that behave...
View ArticleFalling out of love with a language
So, Giles Bowkett asked me on facebook “Why Perl?”. This is the long answer.I’m a Perl hacker. I have been for around 16 years now. Around 5 years ago, prompted by the Pragmatic Programmer and Adam...
View ArticleSupporting the good guys
Graeme (@mathie) Matthieson is one of the good guys. He’s also one of the people behind the Scottish Ruby Conference (né Scotland on Rails).I spent my own money to go to the first one they ran, and it...
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