Re^2: On Commenting Out 'use strict;'

I feel your pain OGB~! In my experience I had a GREAT instructor! You guys on here and my prof in college who enlighted us on Perl. He always said, "never turn off strict", and always comment your code when time permits, but don't leave it out.

After college I got this really cool job as a systems admin using Perl on windoze, I walked into a shop with shaky code, no comments and not a hint of strict~! After fixing programs and converting their unix like utilities to work on windoze the powers above decided to change their web server to windoze. While two of us rushed to learn .asp .Net came along and this web interface needed to be done. So they decided to hire a student who was fresh out of college who knew .Net and has a father who is a .Net programmer. This kid finished the project in record time but me and this other person would be maintaining it (the web person for the web aspect and me for the programming aspect), anyway this other person was skeptical because some of it was in .Net and some of it was in .asp and she didn't like that there wasn't any comments anywhere? I approached the boss and said HEY we need to get this guy commenting his code, this is scary!! I looked at the .Net code and it was ALL over the place, calling here, going there, coming back going there and not a single line of comments!

About a month later the kid comes back to fix some bugs and work on commenting. The kid leaves with everything working (maybe) and one day I go in some of his code to look and low and behold I see these kinds of comments 'global variable' 'private variable' 'helper function' I was in complete awe.... I have since left that college because of it, but I will never stop using Perl.

FU CU

Comment on Re^2: On Commenting Out 'use strict;'

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Re^3: On Commenting Out 'use strict;' by rinceWind (Monsignor) on Aug 11, 2005 at 10:14 UTC
I fairly recently gave some perl coaching to a VB programmer who has been dabbling in perl scripts. He had a problem that required some debugging; I introduced him to the delights of perl5db and we found the problem - a typo in a variable name. I then explained to him about `use strict;` and he agreed it was a good idea, and should be in any agreed coding standards. I also asked him whether he would conceive of having production VB code without "option explicit". He took my point. -- Oh Lord, won’t you burn me a Knoppix CD ? My friends all rate Windows, I must disagree. Your powers of persuasion will set them all free, So oh Lord, won’t you burn me a Knoppix CD ? (Missquoting Janis Joplin)	[reply] [d/l]
Re^4: On Commenting Out 'use strict;' by hatter (Pilgrim) on Aug 11, 2005 at 16:04 UTC
A few minutes with the perl debugger would be enough time for anyone to decide they're rather use strict and avoid having to use the debugger again. `the hatter`	[reply] [d/l]
Re^3: On Commenting Out 'use strict;' by bluto (Curate) on Aug 11, 2005 at 16:06 UTC
This kid finished the project in record time but me and this other person would be maintaining it (the web person for the web aspect and me for the programming aspect), anyway this other person was skeptical because some of it was in .Net and some of it was in .asp and she didn't like that there wasn't any comments anywhere? Now you got me going -- I feel your pain as well. If I don't like rubber-stamp reviews, I really don't like it when management brings in "free" help. Any monkey can be really productive writing code with no design, comments, etc since banging out code is about 25% of what you need to do (if that). The project I mentioned in my previous post also had a case like this. They decided to let some folks half way around the world update a major server. These apes inserted comments in a foreign langauge, had huge indented sections of code with gargantuan variable names, bad memory leaks, and they just dropped it and the abyssmal documentation in our laps to support. Now that I think about it, I think my life mirrors Dilbert...	[reply]