I find it interesting that so few of these points are Perl-specific.
It's interesting you mention that. The original set of ten I had planned
to use
were much more Perl-centric (so much so that we wouldn't have called them "Essential Development Practices", but rather "Essential Perl Coding Practices"):
- Always use strict and use warnings.
- Use grammatical templates when forming identifiers.
- Use lexical variables, not package variables.
- Label every loop that is exited explicitly, and every next,
last,
or redo.
- Don't use bareword filehandles; use indirect filehandles.
- In a subroutine, always unpack @_ first, using a hash of named arguments if
there are more than three parameters.
- Always return via an explicit return.
- Always use the /x ,/m , and /s flags, and the
\A and \z anchors.
- Use capturing parentheses in regexes only when deliberately capturing, then give the captured substrings proper names.
- Never make variables part of a module's interface.
But as I started extracting these guidelines from the book, I realized
that they relied on the reader understanding and accepting other,
earlier guidelines, which in turn relied on other guidelines, etc. etc.
The book is deliberately put together that way, so that the
recommendations work harmoniously together and form a coherent approach
to Perl programming. Unfortunately that made it hard to isolate just ten
of the Perl-specific guidelines and still have them make sense.
That said, if you want to get a better sense of the (great majority of)
Perl-specific advice in the book, take a look at the beta
chapter we have online.
Things like "write tests first", "use revision control", and "no premature optimization" are almost universal recommendations...
...that people universally don't follow. Hence we thought these ten, though not especially Perlish, would still be a valuable reminder.
;-) 