This talk was presented at OSCON 2006 and ApacheCon 2006. It suffers quite a bit from not having the commentary that went with the slides, but my notes for this talk are available on this site as a PDF. This talk was probably the most well-received OSCON talk I've ever done. There were a lot of jokes and people were rolling in the aisles. Larry Wall and Damian Conway attended the talk at OSCON and while they did argue a couple of points they mostly laughed along.

1. low maintenance perl
“optimizing for an easy life”
perrin harkins
plus three

2. the fud
“i would never use perl for a large project.”
“perl is unmaintainable.”
“perl is write­only.”

3. i shouldn't have to tell you this
use strict;
use warnings;
perltidy

4. know your audience
“code is always read more times than it is
written.”
andy hunt

5. choosing a dialect
don't use something complex when
something simple will work.

6. choosing a dialect
don't do things in a magical way when an
explicit way will work.

7. choosing a dialect
don't make your code complex just so you
can get a certain syntax.

8. choosing a dialect
fetch("search.cpan.org") > my @cont;
is equivalent to
my $scraper = FEAR::API­>fear();
my $page = $scraper­>fetch("search.cpan.org");
push my @cont, $page­>document­>as_string;

9. choosing a dialect
follow conventions when you can.

10. choosing a dialect
which scans faster?
s{foo}{bar}g;
s/foo/bar/g;

11. choosing a dialect
don't use an obscure language feature
when a common one will work.

12. choosing a dialect
dragonchild's law:
"if i have to ask if something is possible on
perlmonks, i probably should rethink my
design."

13. obscure features
“We redesigned the protocol several times until we had a
protocol that performed well. However,
the resulting protocol was too complex and depended on the
behavior of Chubby features that were seldom exercised by
other applications. We discovered that we were spending an
inordinate amount of time debugging obscure corner cases,
not only in Bigtable code, but also in Chubby code. Eventually,
we scrapped this protocol and moved to a newer simpler
protocol that depends solely on widely­used Chubby features.”
Google Bigtable Paper

14. obscure features
example of a changing feature:
my $foo = 1 if $bar;

15. never
formats

16. never
punctuation variables
my $text = do { local $/ = undef; <$fh>; };

17. never
import functions that don't import
use Catalyst qw/­Debug/;
use Catalyst ();

18. never
function prototypes
sub do_it (&@) {
blah blah blah
}

19. never
indirect object syntax
new Class #no
Class­>new() #yes

20. never
UNIVERSAL::

21. never
alternative inheritance schemes

22. never
re­blessing existing objects
bless, $object, 'Some::Other::Class';

23. never
objects that aren't hashes
(but maybe Object::InsideOut)

24. never
overloading

25. overloading
use Exception::Class
qw(MyProject::BadKarma);
# in some method, the exception is triggered
MyProject::BadKarma­>throw();
# in the caller, we catch it with eval
if ($@ and $@­>isa('MyProject::BadKarma')) {

26. never
multiple packages in one file

27. never
source filters

28. never
the constant pragma
use constant TEA => 'Darjeeling';
%beverages = (TEA => 1);
our $TEA = 'Darjeeling';
%beverages = ($TEA => 1);

29. never
tied variables
tie(%h,’SDBM_File’, ’filename’,...);
$h{'foo'} = 1;

30. rarely
DESTROY methods

31. rarely
weak references

32. rarely
AUTOLOAD

33. rarely
wantarray
@books = Book­>search(author => $author)
|| die "book not found";

34. sometimes
closures

35. sometimes
string eval

36. sometimes
sub attributes
sub foo : attribute {

37. sometimes
code references

38. sometimes
exported subs

39. sometimes
chained map/grep

40. sometimes
ternary operator
my $foo = $bar ? 'yes' : 'no';

41. sometimes
$_

42. questions you might have
doesn't this take all the fun out of
programming?

43. questions you might have
won't this make your code longer?

44. questions you might have
but AUTOLOAD is awesome!

45. questions you might have
why don't you just use Java?

46. beyond the code
●
configuration management
●
version control with branches

47. beyond the code
●
tests can save your life
●
Test::Class can save your tests
●
smolder,
http://sourceforge.net/projects/smolder/

48. thank you!