I learnt Perl 12 years ago.

Perl has improved.

Don’t write old Perl. Write new shiny Perl.

Book “Perl Best Practises” - doesn’t cover in much depth.

Object orientation

Object orientation. Too flexible. Many implementations wrong or broken. Or both.

Feels like it was bolted on the side.

Moose will solve these problems.

Easy and flexible.

use strict;
use warnings;

relace with

use moose;

roles like interface in other languages.

Autobox

only objects have methods.

autobox turns everything in Perl into a first class object. No methods by default.

autobox::Core, default perl functions as autobox methods.

Moose::AutoBox

Autodie

use autodie

Anything that will fail will automatically die instead of returning failure.

Can inspect error.

Perl 5.10 regular expressions

Can expand over many lines.

Perl 5.10 to the rescue: named capture variables.

Defines. Define Grammer inside regular expression.

Minesweeper

Killer applications:

• Solitare
• Minesweeper

Minesweeper - very repetitive. Needs automation. App:SweeperBot.

Takes over mouse and keyboard. Plays games indefinitely. If you are unlucky it won’t stop, and you can’t get control back again.

PAR

Solves dependancy issues.

Like JAR files for perl.

pp = PAR Packer

PAR - remote repositories to automatically download latest version.

Profiler

SweeperBot far too slow. Takes about 19 seconds to complete expert mode.

Devel::DProf - initial - subroutine level profiler. Good for well structured code. Bad for poorly structured code. Bad for long subroutines. Bad for varying performance depending on parameters.

Don’t optimise code while writing it. Cheaper to buy faster machine then spend longer on writing it. Optimise it when you feel you must.

Devel::NYTProf - written by NYT.

Does line profiling and block profiling.

Forks, recursion, complex expressions all supported.

Fast. Doesn’t slow code down to much.

CVS output supported.

Minesweeper completed in expert mode in 11 seconds.

Code quality

Code review.

Code::Critic - code already read Perl Best practices book.

Test code online: https://perlcritic.com/

Code ratings

https://www.cpanratings.com/