Change of coding heart

If I learned nothing else from last years early term scripting and coding hijinks I think that knowing when to walk away from the task will still be an invaluable lesson to have learned.

Last night I ran up against a few walls, and started feeling the familiar frustration/depression that accompanies running up against coding walls. However I just wrote down descriptions of where the barriers were and some musings on where I might proceed. Then I left the code, read some other modules reading material and packed off to sleep.

Today I overcame one of the barriers, i.e. how to translate arrays into some form of key - value hash, where at least one half of the key/value pair would be common to all of the hashes. I didn’t know where I was to go from there though.

I nodded in approval at Alans suggestion of sketching a plan beforehand, lest you get in a situation where you can’t see the forest for the tress (or the program for the code). By the end of the tutorial I felt I was no closer to solving the homework for this week (even a website whose code purported to do exactly what I wanted to do - the code ended up not working at all).

However Alan’s quick aside on databases made me realise that associative arrays are most likely being introduced as a link in to Tuesdays crash course on Perl and Databases.