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Stagnancy and good practiceby Macphisto (Hermit) |
on Apr 11, 2001 at 09:03 UTC ( [id://71593]=perlmeditation: print w/replies, xml ) | Need Help?? |
Being a college student I rarely have enough time to find a really good project and just dive into it. So usually most of the scripts I write in perl tend to be maintenance scripts to keep my linux boxes neat and clean and running tidy. One thing I never really looked into was being able to do everything I can on the linux machines and the *nix machines on the Win2k machine. As it turns out, most likely what you decided to train yourself in will be the exact opposite of what you're asked. Example: After setting up the linux machine to act as a firewall and do some IP Masquerading, some friends asked me to show them how to do it ... on their Windows Machine. Had it been a professional scenario, I would have been caught with my foot in my mouth as it took me a bit of exploring about to find the exact things I wanted to do. Something that would seem to me as a very good practice -- as well something I don't see very often in my peer programmers, would be to make sure your programs can run across platform. For some this is a no-brainer, but when I brought it up to a fellow student they said, "Who cares ... if they hire us for one platform and it doesn't work on another they happened to try it on, it's their own d*mn fault." As important as it is for your name to stay stable and trustworthy/respectable in the programming field, I found this to be rather disturbing. As it stands, I've been going back through all my programs ( Java, C, C++, and Perl ) and trying to edit them to make them run across all the operating systems at my disposal. For what it's worth, and as one of the reasons it is my favorite language, perl has moved through this process with blinding speed. With rarely an edit needed ( except for filesystems quirks/pragma ) it far outshines the changes I needed to make in the other languages. I wish I'd kept a running tally, so I could post some numbers. Compared to the programs I wrote in Java for Computer Graphics, the ratio was staggering! As well, it's just good practice to be able to say, "Oh wait, this snippet throws an exception, I better catch it or find a better way to of doing it." It's a pretty good learning experience. If you haven't done it, perhaps it is something you might want to look into. It opens you up to a larger population of Employers and Code. Macphisto p.s. Right, no more kool-aide and fried rice for me at midnight... Everyone has their demons....
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