Sigh. So my boss has decided to 'share the joy' and start giving perl tickets to one of my co-workers. Said co-worker is a QA/test/DBA type guy with no real perl knowledge. Said co-worker is obviously just hacking pieces of existing code together with no real understanding of what's going on behind the scenes. Then when the program doesn't work or doesn't compile or doesn't do what he wants - he's in my cubicle asking me why and 'could you just take a look at...'. So, seems like I've just been made chief perl trainer all without my knowledge - isn't that nice. Part of me wants to tell him to bugger off and ask my boss but I suppose I'm too nice for that and end up helping him anyway. Sigh.
My boss knows perl. He has some really cool ideas and has written some pretty cool perl progs in his time. Problem is, he is not a fan of -w or using strict so his code is sometimes a real challenge to mantain - 'where the fuck did that variable come from'. So just recently he had to maintain one of my large-ish cgi progs - uses strict of course - and he was a little lost. Needless to say he's now saying he hates using strict and it's a real pain in the ass to maintain. Obviously, being the perl person that I am, I couldn't disagree more. So, I finally convinced him to try it and he's been writing a module for our use and trying to adhere to strict. When I go past his cubicle I can hear him muttering under his breath - yesterday he storms into my cubicle asking me if I had a book he could borrow with more examples of using strict. Double sigh.
Not sure how this is going to turn out. I have visions of him giving up and saying that from now on we're not to code perl this way - and all because no-one else has enough knowledge to maintain the code in my absence. Isn't that a bit fucked up?? Anyhoo, I'm sure everything will be rosy, he'll grok using strict and will grow to love coding perl this way. Triple sigh.
UPDATE: He did grok strict and likes it. Yippee!!
I can't understand why on Earth people would like *less* feedback about what they're doing. I'm always looking for *more* feedback, programming or otherwise. use strict; gives me more feedback.
