SPUG: Last night's meeting

[Tim Maher]

On Wed, Mar 17, 2004 at 09:50:03AM -0800, Andrew Sweger wrote:
> I would enjoy
> doing it again, maybe with a *real* bug in someone's code that needs
> hunting.

I enjoyed the demo, and was reminded that there are some things that
are better done using perl -d than by print statements.

> Condemn all debug print statements now!

IMHO, the humble print statement has a significant advantage over
any interactive-debugging based strategy, which is simply that it
will still be there if/when the program breaks again, and it can
easily be re-activated to deliver its benefits again.

AFAIK, there's no way to preserve the activities of an
interactive debugging session, and replay them at a future time.

> the ideas pop up around the room like lightning striking. Okay, that's a
> little too fantastic I guess. But you get the idea.
> 
> At the end of the meeting, we turned to the topic of our next meeting.
> Despite the success of last night's meeting, we need a bigger place to
> meet. I forget the gentleman's name who suggested it, but here's a great
> idea: survey the spug-list to learn who the most represented employers
> are, then (professionally) ask those companies if they would sponsor SPUG
> for meeting space.

Ahem, I was that "gentleman" (picture me recoiling in disgust at that
appelation - I prefer "dude" 8-} )

It shouldn't hurt to ask, many companies benefit from
> using Perl, and what's good for SPUG is good for all Seattle area Perl
> programmers. I think this is a great idea. I'm willing to oversee this.  
> I'll follow up with another post for a survey thread (in case folks
> stopped reading several paragraphs above).
> 
> -- 
> Andrew B. Sweger -- The great thing about multitasking is that several
>                                 things can go wrong at once.

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