thorfinn: <user name="seedy_girl"> and <user name="thorfinn"> (0)
thorfinn ([personal profile] thorfinn) wrote in [site community profile] dw_dev 2010-11-17 06:51 am (UTC)

Code Style Automation.

I assume DW has a current Perl coding style, but I'm betting that enforcing it costs you a huge amount of review time.

Perl's biggest problem when it comes to maintainability (which is a huge factor in technical debt) is TMTOWTDI. Adopting Damian Conway's Perl Best Practices as The Coding Style pretty much stops that problem, because it gives you One Way To Do It, for pretty much everything you might want to argue about.

Implementing it as an incremental process on an existing codebase is not hard.... Create a script which runs perlcritic and perltidy over a file and reports errors, and make use of that script as the first thing to be done when checking out code and the last thing to be done before checking in code.

I promise you, that one thing alone will save a huge immense amount of time in code review, code style arguments, and massively improve the readability of your codebase alongside that.

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