Random Perl ... rant

[Peter Hickman]

Iain Barnett wrote:
> On 3 Apr 2008, at 11:34 am, Peter Hickman wrote:
>>
>> I have a deep seated fear of languages that can't be worked from the 
>> command line and vi.
>
> I run all my C#.Net builds from the command line - using perl scripts 
> (and some modules I hope to get on CPAN at some time).
>

I found that nant worked fine for both mono and the MS toolchain

>> Debuggers are too tedious to be useful.  Again, I don't think it's a
>> coincidence that most of the best programmers use "print" instead of
>> single-stepping.
> I really can't believe anyone wrote this. That is the slowest and most 
> tedious way to debug there is. Completely innefficient, and a last 
> resort.

I would agree with this, the code path in Java applications can be all 
over the place that the best way to debug is place a break point where 
you know the code does get to and follow it from there. I would never 
debug Java with print statements. Having said that the sort of problems 
I get with Java demand that I debug things, with Perl a few well placed 
print/Data::Dumper usually does the trick.

Of course putting Log4J(P) all over the place when you develop the code 
simplifies things no end. Yayy for Log4J(P)!!!1!11

-- 
Peter Hickman.

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