Stumbled across a nice perl tid-bit in my daily blog and forum participation, the backtick operator has always been a thorn in debugging many Perl scripts in the past, its so easy to miss the damn things…

I discovered a much more elegant solution today, the qx// operator. Which makes for a much more readable and less error prone syntax…

Perl is a mighty powerful weapon at the disposal of a web developer, a post-modern language that bridges the gap between modernism and post-modernism, i.e. the double edged sword that is…it is os flexible and comprehensive that it can be an extension of your limbs, or misused sever those limbs…we use perl for the majority of our projects here at Blue Star, mostly adhering to the concept coined by Larry Wall (creator or of perl) that programmers rule by the principles of laziness, impatience and hubris. The self righteous attidute that that the code is elegant and well consctructed regardless of the fact that there are probably dozens of ways to solve a particular problem, and by laziness develops libraries that can be re-used and is proud of the resulting code knowing that it can be used again…it is a post modern paradigm this is clear, yet also leads to duplicity…the many ways of doing one thing, but this is the crux, a problem in perl can be solved in many ways, just be sure that it is re-usuable for to satisfy the impatience and laziness of future projects…yet open enough to be rightously expanded in the future to benefit any other project from the grond up…

Larry Wall on post-modernism