Tue, 04 Oct 2005
Perl BP quotes
I have finished reading Perl Best Practices. It is a very good book, even though I cannot fully agree with few of the practices the author recommends. It is also a refreshing and sometimes funny reading - here are my favourite quotes:
[...] However, very occasionally those manipulations can actually make debugging even more difficult, by introducing arcane phenomena like heisenbugs (errors that vanish when you try to debug them), schrödingbugs (errors that manifest only when you're trying to debug something else), and mandelbugs (complex errors that seem to fluctuate more and more chaotically, the closer you look at them).
[...] If there's anything less enjoyable than beating your head against a bug for several hours, it's finally discovering that your debugging print statement was itself buggy, and the problem isn't anywhere near where you thought it was. This is presumably a homerbug.
Or this one about version control systems:
After all, rm * is never more than half a dozen keystrokes away.
Or this rant about the Perl interpreter itself:
[...] But, unless you are deeply familiar with the internals of the Perl interpreter(*), [...]
(*) In which case you already have far more serious personal issues to deal with.