Dynamic languages such as Perl, Python, PHP, and Ruby are wonderfulfor their ability to allow hackers to whip out programs quite quickly. But if you aren't careful that ease and quickness can bite you. How can you make your quick hack into something more maintainable? Or if you are inheriting another's code or hoping to help out a project, how can you feel confidence in your changes to the code-base?

This talk will discuss issues that might crop up with dynamic languages and how to deal with them:

• Issues with Dynamic Languages
• Code standards
• Code quality -- how to measure
• Refactoring
• Testing
• Code coverage
• Managing patches

All of these topics are common to programming. But there are some subtleties that dynamic languages present. Though this session will focus on Python and provide examples and samples in python, the ideas behind it will be applicable to programmers using Perl, PHP, and Ruby as well.