Re: Do good Perl practices carry over to other coding?

Most good coding practices are language-agnostic. Being smart, safe, efficient or innovative isn't something that originated when people started coding Perl. Good programmers do smart things, they do it safe, efficient and are innovative, even if they have never written a single bit of Perl. They could be writing Java, C, Ada, Pascal, FORTRAN, Haskell, ML, Lisp or whatever.

As for carrying over to HTML.... well, that's like asking whether your good practises of creating rockets carry over to folding paper planes.

Abigail

Comment on Re: Do good Perl practices carry over to other coding?

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Re: Re: Do good Perl practices carry over to other coding? by etcshadow (Priest) on Jan 20, 2004 at 18:24 UTC
I agree and disagree. For the most part, "high level" good coding practices, such as: document inline, create useful abstractions, organize your code well, etc, can be applied to nearly any language. However, there are many (fairly general) good practices which cannot necessarily be applied everywhere or to any language. For example, using descriptive variable names or name-spaces: some languages put limits on your ability to do this, often by draconian identifer length limits. Another example is limiting side-effect. What is even meant by side-effect can be very different from one language to another, and the notion of where the grey line between good side-effect and bad side-effect is even more tightly coupled to the language in use. Anyway, that's just nit-picking, sorry, but the point I guess I meant to make is that "good practices" are something that has to be a little more specific than being "smart, safe, efficient and innovative." That's basically being "good, safe, good, and good" at programming (I give credit to "safe" because it's at least one thing on that list that isn't self-evident... but it is nearly so). I guess my point is that "good, safe, efficient, and innovative" are more like a philosophy or a mantra, than a good practice, and good practices do tend to be at least somewhat language specific. `------------ :Wq Not an editor command: Wq` [download]	[reply] [d/l]

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Re: Re: Do good Perl practices carry over to other coding?
by etcshadow (Priest) on Jan 20, 2004 at 18:24 UTC

For example, using descriptive variable names or name-spaces: some languages put limits on your ability to do this, often by draconian identifer length limits.

Another example is limiting side-effect. What is even meant by side-effect can be very different from one language to another, and the notion of where the grey line between good side-effect and bad side-effect is even more tightly coupled to the language in use.

Anyway, that's just nit-picking, sorry, but the point I guess I meant to make is that "good practices" are something that has to be a little more specific than being "smart, safe, efficient and innovative." That's basically being "good, safe, good, and good" at programming (I give credit to "safe" because it's at least one thing on that list that isn't self-evident... but it is nearly so). I guess my point is that "good, safe, efficient, and innovative" are more like a philosophy or a mantra, than a good practice, and good practices do tend to be at least somewhat language specific.

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