a picture is worth a thousand words

This week in the Perl world we have seen two events that I believe are very important:

1. new look and content in http://www.perl.org
2. new blogging system at http://blogs.perl.org

Such actions are those that cause direct impact on the community attraction, so my sincere congratulations to all involved in them.

In my opinion, Perl has an enormous inner strength, that with relatively little effort may be evident in a simple way to everyone else.

I'm sure when we try to justify the revival of Perl, these two events will be listed.

Good work!

choosing a bad module name... Modern::Perl?

I have been using Modern::Perl, and it's great. In a unique and single line you can enable all the nice and "modern" features.

But, in my opinion, the name of this module was bad selected.

Why?

Currently the meaning of modern perl is matched 100% by this module, and this it's Ok; but in 2020 (for instance), modern Perl won't be achieved with Modern::Perl, and we will need other module, similar but different...

The name is nice, but sometimes we have to think in this kind of tips.

perl story

In my work, I have a reputation of data-problematic-related fast resolver. Yesterday, I received a ZIP file with 200 Excel files. The problem: each XLS file had a close but different format, with columns changed or dropped. They wanted a complex report with the result of joining all files (in the correct way).

So I wrote a script with Spreadsheet::ParseExcel (I've used it before), and in a few minutes I had a script that extracted the information and merged it in a simple CSV file. Then I did an import process in Excel and generate the report with dynamic tables. Success!

Perl saved me hours of work (tedious) and made me happy. I often use Perl in this way, doing load, extraction and transformation tasks. I often write little scripts that simplify my work and increase my productivity. That's the reason because I have to resolve many problems of this kind every day ... and I like it.