O'Reilly Open Source Convention - August 1-5, 2005

Session
Extreme Perl Makeover
Peter Scott, Owner, Pacific Systems Design Technologies

Track: Perl
Date: Thursday, August 4th, 2005
Time: 4:30pm - 5:15pm
Location: Portland 256
When your program gets out of bed in the morning is it afraid to look in the mirror? Have you inherited a hideous lump of code that would need an exorcism before you could get it to run under "use strict"? We'll look at some code that crawled out from under a rock and show techniques for refactoring it until it's suitable to bring home to meet your mother.

Perl is easy to start using. But sometimes, being easy can get you into trouble. The many ways to program in Perl mean that code can often be cryptic, obscure, or muddled. Being able to resurrect the rotten legacy program that just landed on your desk is an increasingly necessary skill. So is being able to upgrade and maintain the program you wrote a year ago when you were less experienced (or less sober) than now.