Oh, wow, where to start? There are a lot of nasty things I do in Perl that are actually necessary. Sometimes, they're necessary simply because the code is (originally) intended to be a quick one-off for debugging or proof-of-concept purposes, so spending 3 hours doing it "right" loses out to spending 10 minutes to get it done. And sometimes, they're necessary because there simply isn't a nicer way of doing it.

Here's a sample "second-best" pattern that I've used recently, that causes co-workers and bosses to cringe, despite being reasonably sane and acceptable. I've seen it pop up all over, most recently in merlyn's SysAdmin article: 

...
{
    no strict 'refs';
    *{"${class}::get_${name}"} = sub {
        ...
    };
}
...

[download]
The "no strict 'refs'" and symbol-table mucking is certainly justified, because there's really no better way to do it, but it still feels "second-best" to me.

In reply to Re: RFC: Perl Second-Best Practices by dave0
in thread RFC: Perl Second-Best Practices by dimar

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