Recently in Code craft Category

Nadim has released Asciio, a Perl/GTK application that lets you draw ASCII charts using a GUI. Objects on the screen are sizable and have all the properties you'd expect in a drawing tool (titles for the boxes, bullets, etc), but the end result is plain text that's embeddable in your code.

Here's the first of two screencasts that give you a feel for its capabilities.

Nadim says "I find myself starting it quite often just to draw a little diagram that helps me write better Perl code. Then I can keep it in the code itself."

"I practice annoyance driven development. I set my threshold of annoyance low such that everytime I feel frustrated by a technical limitation, I notice consciously. My intent is not to find technology endlessly frustrating (though that happens sometimes), but so that I can identify the next most important thing to fix."

-- chromatic, in "What You Test Changes How You Test"

Michael Schwern has written a column for Andy Oram's Beautiful Code blog called LWP::Simple - Simple Goal, Simple Interface. In it, he talks about minimizing the "gulf of execution" with a two-line easy-to-understand Perl program:

use LWP::Simple;
my $page = get("http://www.google.com");

Bravo to Schwern to getting the words "Perl" and "beautiful code" together. I can't wait to see part two.