Perl IS a community!

Ever have code that doesn't work and you don't know why? I do on occasion, and the error messages didn't tell me anything useful, so I decided to try Perl::Critic on it. This is less a tool to debug your non-functioning program than a program that tells you a better way to have your functioning program function, but I thought it could tell me something.

I generally start all my programs these days with:

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1. use Modern::Perl ;  

use Modern::Perl ;

This takes the place of this:

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1. use 5.010 ;  
2. use strict ;  
3. use warnings ;  

use 5.010 ;
use strict ;
use warnings ;

This is very nice, in that it gets you to the cool stuff in Perl in one line.

But...

Perl::Critic wants you to run using strict and warnings, and when you use Modern::Perl, it doesn't explicitly say that you are using them, and Critic dinks you for it.

I thought that was interesting.

And, today, when you find something interesting, you tweet it. I also put it on Identi.ca, which is like twitter but mostly programmer types go there. And I got a response. From chromatic on identi.ca and from the Critic folks on Twitter.

That just warms my heart. Not specifically the help to make it work, which is of course great, but that the developers are listening.

And, incidently, making a .perlcritic file with this in it makes it work:

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1. equivalent_modules = Modern::Perl  

equivalent_modules = Modern::Perl