At the risk of turning off future employers...

[edhorch]

...let me say for the record that I SUCK at Perl

Comments

[winterene]

I'll feel bad for you, but I'll still laugh, if I ever read a blog post of yours explaining how, in the middle of an interview for a job that requires Perl, the hiring manager pulls out a printout of your blog post.

[edhorch]

I fully expect that to happen. More generally, I'm ready to be asked to explain anything I've posted online ever.

If asked about this in an interview (are you listening, interviewers?), I'd point out that a) I didn't say what I was trying to do in Perl (it's not exactly "hello world"), and b) I learned Unix by writing device drivers in System III.

[winterene]

I hope I never have to explain my blog posts in an interview.

[edhorch]

Good luck with that! :)

[jigsawn]

0) I didn't know there was such a thing as good Perl code

[jigsawn]

I'll tell you the one trick I really do love in Perl, though: You can use a scalar variable as the name of another variable, just by doing ${$name}.

[edhorch]

That is very nice. I wish more scripting languages had that. Ksh has nameref, but bash and other Bourne-like shells don't, forcing you to do ugly things with eval.

[winterene]

Hey Ed, please e-mail me with a #, I need to talk to you.