CPAN Reviews
Thursday May 15, 2008 6:00AM
For years, many people have argued that one of PHP's big successes is deployment. The language has little to recommend it for anything beyond simple database-backed HTML templating, but there's little easier than dropping a couple of .php files in… read more chromaticThursday May 08, 2008 4:26PM
I like numbers. They can mean a lot of things. Rather than continuing silly arguments over obfuscated and flawed measurements of "language popularity", perhaps a better way of measuring the viability of a language or platform is to measure the… read more chromaticMonday November 19, 2007 10:23AM
Michael Schwern, Perl clown and maintainer of ExtUtils::MakeMaker and Test::Simple has announced that MakeMaker and Test::Simple will no longer support Perl 5.005. This is extremely significant because those two distributions are important pieces of Perl's upgrade infrastructure. Perl 5.005 is… read more chromaticAdding Show Source to Perl Exceptions
Friday October 12, 2007 6:00AM
Adrian Howard asked on PerlMonks is there any way to access the contents of a block eval?. After catching an exception in Perl, can you see the source code that threw the exception, without using a source filter? I wrote many of my parts… read more chromaticThursday August 02, 2007 1:15PM
JT Smith, president of Plain Black, the creator of WebGUI, and one of the unsung successes of using Perl in business, recently sent me this essay. He gave me permission to publish it in its entirety here. (In the interest… read more chromaticWednesday July 25, 2007 7:41AM
Nobody develops for Perl anymore, CPAN is too crowded. Jordan Henderson chromaticCPAN Module Review: App::SVNBinarySearch
Friday July 13, 2007 6:00AM
Large, complex, cross-platform applications with multiple developers sometimes have bugs. Some of those bugs never appear on your own machine; they lurk for a while until someone else builds and tests the software on a different platform, in different circumstances.… read more chromaticCPAN Module Review: Pod::POM::Web
Friday May 25, 2007 6:00AM
Perl has a long history of copious documentation through the Plain Old Documentation format. This applies to much of CPAN, not just the core modules and documentation. The perldoc utility is the main way to view this documentation. It has more features than… read more chromaticFriday April 20, 2007 4:07PM
I believe that a programming language should never crash, even given bad input. There may be cases where it reports obscure syntax errors that are difficult to understand, but crashing is unacceptable. One way to make sure that there are no crashes… read more chromaticWhen Strict isn't strict Enough
Tuesday April 17, 2007 6:00AM
One of the weirdest portability problems I've ever encountered is dealing with platforms with case-insensitive filesystems. Files I expected to be there mysteriously weren't. Files I didn't expect to be there mysteriously were. Case-sensitivity in programming languages confuses novices too,… read more chromatic
