Any Perl victims care to explain this?

[Matthew Hawkins]

On Fri, 05 Apr 2002, Alex Satrapa wrote:
> My apologies for recommending you explore the DBI modules, Matthew.  

That's okay.  Just watch out if I see you standing on the side of a road
;)  (other cluggers - its an in-joke)

> They appear to be broken

Not quite fair.  Tie::DBI is broken IMHO, and I wouldn't classify that
as a DBI module.  The things I would classify as DBI modules work great
and is why I went through this torture in the first place.  Apart from
fetchall_arrayref returning stupid things (but stupid CONSISTENT things!
Yippee!), it was all sweet when I went back to using them instead.

I did say this privately to a few people so apologies to them for
repeating it, but the real issue I had was not which particular language
I used, or what functionality of it I used, but the fact that I forgot
Knuth's lesson about "Premature optimisation is the root of all evil".

I didn't use Tie::DBI because it was appropriate, I used it because it
appeared to make the code shorter (in an ideal world).  It also made the
code not work.  Let that be a lesson.

It was amusing to read all the posts in this thread with such helpful
remarks like "it doesn't do that" (to an observation!?  hello?) and
"you're not as smart as you think you are" (er.. obviously, since I
wrote it in Perl instead of something I'm more familiar with, and you
know it).  Personal insults go such a long way in investigating why some
observed problem occurs.  I note these people had all sorts of fun
optimising and chuckling at the irrelevent bits of my code, and not much
to say about the real problem.  I think that says more about them than
my already well-known legendary perl skills ;)

-- 
Matt