perlmeditation chromatic <p>Max K-A is one of the Bugzilla hackers. You might remember him from <a href="">The Problems of Perl: The Future of Bugzilla</a>, where he described some of the maintainability problems that Bugzilla faced. After some discussion, he's updated his thoughts in <a href="">Ooh, I Made Coding Horror</a> (Coding Horror unfortunately drew the wrong lessons from Max's post). Here's one particular insight worth discussing:</p> <blockquote>Perl isn't fundamentally flawed, but it's kind of flawed in <em>practical</em> terms, in the way that it's <em>commonly</em> used. Imagine that you had a book that taught you how to write, and then after you were done with it, somebody had to come up to you and say, "Okay, that's not really how you write. I mean, you could write that way, but everybody would laugh at you. Also, you can't use that pencil, you should use this special pen, because it makes life a lot easier." There's nothing wrong with the <em>language</em> you're using to write, but there is something wrong with the <em>instructions</em> you were given and the <em>tools</em> you were handed.</blockquote> <p>Given the recent release of Perl 5.10 (and plenty of nice new improvements), the success of modules such as [CPAN://Perl::Critic] and niceness of [CPAN://Moose], and the (finally!) <a href="">mercy killing of Perl 5.005</a>, how can Perl programmers in the know transfer knowledge of all of the wonderful new features that the admittedly voluminous Perl documentation in the wild doesn't mention.</p> <p>That is, when can the rest of the world start using wonderful new techniques, idioms, and features that have come around in the past couple of years?</p>