Kevin's Weblog

A new feature — my Perl Hall of Shame, featuring occasional snippets of perl code that someone actually wrote. Today, a little pattern I’ll call “useless use of $_”:

for ( 0..9 ) {
  my $i = $_;
  for ( 0..9 ) {
    my $j = $_;
    ...
  }
}

I think that perhaps the author of this was trying to avoid polluting the enclosing lexical scope with his loop variables, but wasn’t aware that exactly the same thing can be achieved without resorting to punctuation variables:

for my $i ( 0..9 ) {
  for my $j ( 0..9 ) {
    ...
  }
}

It’s been one of those rollercoaster weeks at work. I really need to figure out how to get my zen on. It’s suddenly become clear to me that the turf wars being fought are much bigger than I realized and that probably no amount of reasoned argument from us down in the trenches will have any impact. Possibly coding like mad will, but I’m not sure; it might just lead to coding like mad in a different direction later. At any rate, it may well be best for my sanity if I just duck my head down for a couple weeks, ignore it all, and get shit done.

This week, I’ve gotten two emails out of the blue from head hunters, both just completely mis-targetted. So, beyond me learning that I should perhaps remove one or two keywords from my resume, I have a couple observations / suggestions for recruiters:

• Where it says “I am not currently looking for work”; I mean it.
• I am not really impressed by your assertion that the job is “very secure” because you’ve had someone working there for 2.5 years.
• 9K concurrent users also does not impress me.
• I’m probably not interested in working on stuff I did in my first year out of college and haven’t touched since.