See http://www.pobox.com/~schwern/IePP/
Once again, we wade into the muck of those Perl idioms which have proven to be wholely ineffective, flawed or otherwise just plain wrong. Last year, the most horrific extremes of the coding world were brought forth and cut open and much giggling was had. This year we will move beyond simply shooting fish in a barrel. As the audience of YAPC is a bit more advanced (in Perl, anyway) than your average conference, we'll move into more controversial areas of style. (Of course, we'll include a few crowd pleasers.) Once again, code snippets will be gathered from various existing sources. This year, instead of calling for the Worst of Perl, we will be examining code which is merely mediocre and show how it could have been made better with little effort.
If time (and the audience) permit, each idiom will be briefly stepped through, reasons why it is ineffective will be explained along with possible reasons why a programmer might choose this idiom. Some questions/discussion from the audience will be had (the more controversial the pronouncement, the more discussion.) and a more effective idiom will be proposed, stepped through and explained. Another round of audience participation and finally we'll move onto the next idiom.
This is intended primarily as a session for intermediate programmers who have not only blown off a few toes, but have learned enough to sew them back on again. More experienced programmers may wish to attend to watch the Christians be thrown to the lions. Less experienced programmers should still be able to follow along.
Material handed out to attendees will include "Before and After" listings of each idiom and definitions of each ineffective idiom and the more effective one to replace it. (Hopefully this year I will actually get around to typing all this up.)
Judging from the reaction last year to my use of C< $foo = <<"";
> in an effective idiom, I think I will step on many toes this year.
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