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A lightning talk I gave at YAPC in Kiev.
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The Kingdom of the Blind
You are all elite Perl
programmers
You go to Perl
conferences
You are members of
the Perl community
Most Perl programmers
aren't
They don't follow Perl
news
They don't read Perl
blogs
They don't buy Perl books
They don't join Perl Mongers
They don't call
themselves Perl
programmers
They are programmers who use Perl
Talking to these people is interesting
They don't know what they don't
know
Perl Groups
PerlPerl DevelopersPerl Mongers
“In the kingdom of the blind...”
“... theone-eyed
man is king”
So much misinformation
So many outdated practices
Web apps
Matt Wright's CGI parser
Raw HTML in strings
Advanced programmers use CGI.pm
HTML generation
One bad example
(not Perl specific)
Time zones
“There are 24 time zones”
(actually there are 40)
“Time zones all differ by one hour”
(Venezuela: UTC-04:30Iran: UTC+03:30
Nepal: UTC+05:45and others)
“The UK uses UTC”
(True – apart from the seven months a year when we use British
Summer Time)
Perl examples
“eq” is used to assign a
string
You can't open a file unless
you use readdir() first
Stack Overflow
Guess the problem
“Perl thinks my two
strings are the same”
'foo' eq 'bar'
Ah yes, and you are the first
person to have noticed this bug
since 1987. Sure.(Klortho #11943)
People lack most basic
programming skill
RTFM
Asuggestion
Perl Community Outreach
Team
Get out of the echo chamber
Take a holiday in
the Kingdom of the Blind
Help people to improve their Perl
(But do it gently, please)
Bonus side effect
See how other people
use Perl
See what confuses
them
See what docs can be improved
Help the Perl community to
improve information
Everybody wins
(Except, perhaps,
your sanity)
Join me in the Kingdom of the Blind
Easy way to make a
difference
See you on LinkedIn
