I want to start off by saying that Perl has to be one of the most fantastic
languages I’ve every had to work in. I’m not really learning it because I have
a keen interest in Perl, I’m learning to be helpful regarding the legacy codebase
at my work.

A little grind goes a long way…

I wrote a bit of a script, after spending a few weeks perusing through a hefty
codebase, and even with a little bit of Programming Perl under my belt, I
still don’t have the skill to just roll out a lot of code off the top of my head. To
make sure I was putting some test coverage in place (of which there isn’t in
this particular project), I looked up Test::Simple and Test::More and started
the file that would house my tests.

I found after I have covered the existing code that I was looking at my new
function stubs, and wondering how to best describe what they were going to do. Without
even really thinking about it, I started writing tests to say, “It should
do this, or that” and in a couple minutes I had created a spec for the
function I was writing.

Almost like fun

The neat thing is, having the spec in place allowed me to play with the code a
little bit to see if it was doing what I wanted when I tried different things.
If you recall, Perl has that “There Is Moar Than One Way To Do It”(TM) thing,
which can be a good and a bad thing, but more about that later.

The real fun is when I made the realization that I was actually doing Test Driven Development
to learn Perl. TDD is something I’ve always thought would benefit my coding
style, but I never really realized how until today.

Until next time,
Af