Contrary to appearances, you do attempt sanity and caution.

Well..."caution" at least. ;-)

...when you write more routine programs, I suspect you use fewer typeglobs and symbolic references.

Probably so. Though I suspect that, even in those cases, I'm more partial to typeglobbing a closure than most folks would be.

If you count documentation as commenting...then you do indeed have verbose comments.

Hmmm. Not sure that counts in the sense I meant. I rarely document how the code works.

Polymorphism is the one issue I disagree with you on.

Well, thank goodness we differ somewhere! I think the point is that, unlike a member of a project coding team, I write code that (I hope) will be used by thousands of people around the world. That promotes TMTOWTDI to a prime design criterion and makes it essential to provide a range of interfaces that cater to a vast diversity of coding prejudices styles.

for the sake of Perl, I hope you look both ways before you cross the street...

Yes. I do try to keep myself available to support what I've contributed. ;-)

Though, as my count of CPAN modules climbs towards the 30's (by the end of this year), it's becoming increasing difficult to maintain them all in a timely fashion. ;-(

And things will probably get even worse next year. YAS is about to announce a funding drive to extend my Year For Perl into 2002 (and to sponsor another one or two Perl Serfs as well!) But, with so many Perl people hurting financially in the tech downturn, I'm concerned that indentured servants are a luxury the Perl community can no longer afford.

So many people were so very generous in funding the work I've done this year, and I hope they felt that their contributions were well spent. But even if they do, that doesn't mean they'll still be in a position to extend that generosity this time round. Corporate donations may take up some of the short-fall, but I'm readying myself to have to cut back on my Perl work, in order to earn a living in 2002.

Of course, I may be completely mistaken about that, and we'll raise the money as easily as we did last year. I hope that's the case. But even then, things will still get worse: I'll continue to churn out new modules at about the same rate, and therefore have to dice my maintenance timeslices even more thinly. ;-)