Embrace the Little Conveniences

When Perl 6 introduced say (like print, but appends a newline) I had some skepticism.

Yes, the Modern::Perl module was as much a polemic as it was a convenience.

I know File::Slurp exists, but my fingers by now know how to read from a file in a single line of (impenetrable to the uninitiated) code:

my $text = do { local (@ARGV, $/) = $file; <> };

... and in each case, my initial feeling of "Why bother? What does that offer? How silly!" were wrong. In every one of these cases, the ability to write (and the requirement to read) less code has made my code better.

With say I don't have to worry about single- versus double-quotes, or even quoting at all sometimes. With use Modern::Perl;, I don't have to worry about enabling various features and pragmas. With File::Slurp, all I have to care about when reading from a file is typing read_file( $path ).

None of these are big deals on their own, but they're little details I don't have to worry about anymore. The same principle which says that Proc::Fork is easier to manage than writing your own forking code (I've written far too much of my own forking code) applies.

Sometimes getting the little nuisances out of the way makes me more productive and ready to tackle the big nuisances. Maybe saving my brainpower for complicated problems (what's the standard deviation from a least square fit?) is a better approach to typing my own read_file() function on every project.

As silly as it once seemed to use a CPAN module for a one liner, I've realized that not reusing good code is even sillier.