How to Create Coding Standards that Work One of the things that
we love most about Perl is its flexibility, itssimilarity to
natural language, and the fact that There's More Than One Way To
Do It. Of course, when I say ``we'' I mean Perl hackers; the
implicit ``them'' in this case is management, people who prefer
other languages, or people who have to maintain someone else's
line noise. |"Just because there are bad coding standards out
there, doesn't mean that all coding standards are bad."| Perl
programmers tend to rebel at the idea of coding standards, or at
having their creativity limited by arbitrary rules -- otherwise,
they'd be coding in Python :). But I think that sometimes a
little bit of consistency can be a good thing. As Larry himself
said in one of his State of the Onion talks, three virtues of
coding are Diligence, Patience and Humility. Diligence (the
opposite of Laziness, if you're paying attention) is necessary
when you're working with other programmers. You can't afford to
name your variables