Messy Perl code

thebaldsoprano

Hey, just looking for some advice about this.

While I must admit I like the language, where I work we've got tons of ad hoc Perl scripts and larger chunks of code that are a bit all over the place.

Dunno what it is about Perl, but it seems to lend itself to this. Database code is the worst offender.

Anyways, a couple of us are looking at getting things cleaned up a bit. The approach we're taking is to look at the bad code, get it into a nice function/method and then say something along the lines of "use this or else!".

A set of good programming practices will also be needed.

Has anyone got any advice or could recommend a good book on this kind of thing?

Cheers!

fergalr

Personal opinion is Perl can be great... but also has more potential to turn into horrible mess than many other languages, because there's so many different idioms that can be used to accomplish any task.

A well written set of coding guidelines/code standard can make all the difference. Worked on a project that used a lot of perl to write fairly complex libraries, but because a well documented coding standard was adhered to, everything was readable and nice.