Do you break it to them that they need to read the Perl Best Practices Book and take it to heart? How do you tell them if you do?

As others have pointed out one geek's meat is another geek's poison.

I think the real issue here is a communication one, maybe what needs to happen is that you all get together and agree a set of coding standards?

As programmers it's easy to forget that human beings tend not to work in a straightforwardly algorithmic way. Generally people want to be involved in the decisions about how they're going to work, and don't appreciate Johnny-Come-Lately telling them everything they've been doing is wrong.

So get together, maybe with the Best Practices book, or Effective Perl there and agree on your standards as a team. I'd bet that you'd all benefit from the process and you'll certainly come up with a 'livable-with' standard, even if it means you have to compromise on some of what you consider "the best way to do things".

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