Learning to love the snake

2010-03-31T10:47:00+01:00

Yesterday I finished of what is hopefully the last testing release of the product I'm responsible for, assuming no major problems it will go gold soon. This means I can start on doing some new development work. The thing I'm working on next will be done in a scripting language as basically the task of ensuring configurations are correct and properly setup is a) not performance critical and b) a hell of a lot easier than wrangling strings in C.

While most of the scripting stuff on the product is written in perl I've been contemplating doing something a bit more major with Python. While the perl I write (example) probably looks more like C with extra punction marks compared to the code of a seasoned perl wrangler I still occasionaly get tripped up by it. In contrast my experience with Python so far has been much more pleasent, no doubt helped by the ability to experiment in an interactive python shell. So far it's behaviour has been unsurprising. We shall see how I feel about it after this piece of work :-)

Of course the first thing to do before starting out on this course is to see if my editor is configured and ready. I've immediately walked into the python.el and python-mode.el schism. I'm going with python-mode.el for the time being but at the moment I'm not doing much more than run iPython as a inferior shell within Emacs.

Too much perl, the irony

2008-06-24T16:42:00+01:00

I got my current job based on my experience with C/C++ and GTK. So far most of the code I've been writing has been perl and Java. Some times I think I'm writing too much perl:

# Quick and dirty match for IP (but without the tedious address # verification) my $ip_match=qr#([\d]{1,3}\.[\d]{1,3}\.[\d]{1,3}\.[\d]{1,3})#i;

The tedious address verification is what I laboured through on one of my Google phone interviews. I'm still not convinced by the argument of doing within the regex, and it will make it the regex so much more ugly and hard to follow. I skipped it here because the data is already verified and all I really need to differentiate from is [d]*.

Alex's Adventures on the Infobahn - perl

Learning to love the snake

Too much perl, the irony