Reddit reviews Perl Best Practices

Perl::Critic is awesome, highly recommend pairing it with Perl Best Practices. i can never remember which came first, but this book tackles the pros and cons of many of the critiques very well.

Read this afterwards. If you're going to be a programmer, you should start learning best practices as soon as possible. These are all just suggestions, but they're pretty good ones.

I've seen it on page 5 of Perl Best Practices, but I don't know if they lifted it from somewhere else.

I'd be really genuinely interested to see a source for your comment regarding "-pbp" being out of favour. Do you have a link? I always thought thedamian was incredibly well respected in the Perl community. His book Perl Best Pratices is a great read, in my opinion... Actually, his Object Oriented Perl is an amazing read, too.

EDIT: daft spelling error

Ahead: I'll be saying unpopular things here. Please consider the actual points before downvoting and if you disagree, please do so with a post or upvote a reply that you think explains a disagreement with what i say best. Also please keep in mind that this is my perspective and opinion, i do not claim anything as fact.

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I think the main problem with PHP is that, ultimately, it seems to be a language by lazy people, for lazy people. Now, this in itself is not the problem. Laziness is a virtue.

However it seems to encourage a certain type of mindset that results in developers caring less about good design, stability and security^1 than other developers would wish them to.

It also seems to lead to a certain kind of complacency. Since quite a few PHP developers will be of a certain lazy kind of sort, they won't seek out other languages to learn. I have known quite a few people who do PHP as their day job. I can group them into two kinds:

• ones that dislike PHP, and actually do know other languages with high familiarity
  
• ones that like PHP, but knew no or few other languages with high familiarity
  
  The result from that in my experience is that with PHP programmers in the second group i can have less meaningful conversations about generic programming topics because they've simply never worked with concepts that are not present in PHP itself, and on the other hand cannot meaningfully convey them new ideas, like the benefits of functional programming.
  
  Also, something people seem to like to ignore is that, while ultimately it is up to the developer whether they write bad code or not, the combination of target demographics in PHP and the lack of guidance towards good code by the core language do have an effect on how the average produced code turns out. (I hope i won't need to explain this, but can provide a more detailed example on request.)
  
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  Personally I learned PHP as my 3rd programming language and used it successfully for 3 years. Then i switched to Perl and have been using it for 8 years with great success and pleasure. Looking back there are a few things that stand out the most to me in what Perl gave me over PHP:
  
  
• testing and quality compaigns. when i write a web app in Perl all the components run extensive test suites at installation and similarly all my code runs through integration test suite to make sure it all plays well together. this gives me a degree of confidence that PHP simply has not matched yet. similarly there is also nothing like Perl Best Practices for PHP
  
• scoping. with strict enabled Perl has very tight and clear-cut scoping, which means i need to remember less things at any given time. in PHP i need to wonder at all times if a variable came from before my current scope with a value already set.
  
• DRY culture. PHP has some sharing of pre-written components, and there is PEAR. however the amount and breadth of choice that CPAN offers isn't there, since PHP as a culture does not have this ingrained urge to identify and release components that can be generalized for reuse in other applications.
  
  These are the three main reasons why i personally prefer not to work with PHP.
  
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  ^1 Compare: PHP - Perl