The legacy of Perl

By Scott McWhirter (‎kungfuftr‎) from London.pm, Belfast.pm, Oxford.pm
Date: Wednesday, 31 August 2005 12:20
Duration: 40 minutes
Language:

You start a job, you start hacking, then you get asked to look at some code. You read the code a little and to your horror, it's undocumented, unreadable and you suspect the developer was on hooked on smoking camelcrack. We can all be presented with situations like this, but it's hard to predict how long it will take to produce the results your superiors are after, wether you kludge the change or rewrite it.

So what is to be done? There's introducing tests, documentation, refactoring and the like; however these can be unnessecary. To work with the codebase you need to start analysing and tracking it.

I'll cover how to start managing your legacy code to help boost productivity, reproducability and predictability. This talk might sound a bit like a managment talk, but it's for hackers too... this stuff can make your life easier!