The recent discussion at Some thoughts around the "is Perl code maintainable" discussion got me to thinking about the PM obfuscated code section. One of the posts talked about the Perl culture's love for obfuscation. My first reaction was a) not me, I don't like obfu or golf and rarely read posts containing them and b) the fact that some people like obfu and golf doesn't mean that the Perl community as a whole thinks they are good ideas in production code. My guess is that even people who enjoy obfu rarely use it in their day jobs. So then I began to wonder, if that's true, would it be worth stating so explicitly here at PM? I'm thinking of an extra sentece or two in the description at the top of the obfu section along the lines of:
Obfuscation and golf can be fun and can help hone skills useful in writing real code, but they are not meant to be, in themselves, good examples of Perl code. Post and read here to impress and be impressed with minutia, but put your production oriented code in the Code Catacombs or Meditations sections. In other words kids, do try this at home, just don't try it at work! :-)
That's probably a little heavy-handed but can maybe get some discussion going about what we'd like it to say.
update : corrected link to Code Catacombs, added formatting
In reply to Better labeling of obfuscated code section by jZed
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