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

LinkedIn

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So many outdated practices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

Dave Crossdave@perlhacks.com

@davorg