Apparently the author is not familiar with this idiom, though it's pretty common.

He does say

Sure, one could pass a reference to a hash with these key value pairs, and then decode the hash inside the subroutine. Again, this is asking the programmer to do what the language should intrinsically understand: in essence, to code around the language.

I missed this the first time I read the article. I'm kind of ambivalent about this way of thinking. I accept the argument as valid, but on the other hand it's not a whole lot of overhead (read: not much syntactic sugar required). The cookbook shows a number of compact techniques for doing this. Although when writing OO Perl, it really is a drag to have to write my $self = shift every single time.

What I have noticed with Perl is that I figure out very few tricks myself from first principles. Just about all of my mastery has come from reading books and other people's code. The only other language that I have observed this is C++. If you haven't read the Gang of Four book, and studied how the STL works, you'll only ever skim the surface.

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