No programming language is perfect. Whether you develop in PHP or Perl, Jython or Java, Scala or sh, Clojure or Cobol, there’s something about your devlang that you find awkward and ungainly and difficult – some misfeature (or missing feature) that makes your job unnecessarily harder. Some construct or constraint that irritates you beyond all reason.
The grass often looks greener on the other side. You hear people raving about Haskell or Scala or Erlang or Groovy or Raku, and you wonder whether it might be better to migrate to one of those brave new worlds.
But to change your environment, you don’t always have to change planets. Most of the time, it’s vastly easier and more effective just to improve your existing planet.
In this talk, Damian will look at four major annoyances and blockers in one of his own favorite languages (Perl), and explain how he went about converting them into features and enablers...just by writing a little more Perl.