Some poor bastard posted this script to /r/perl, asking for help improving its performance. They received a lot of advice: some good, some terrible. A lot of the advice was about common beginner's mistakes that the OP had made; this was often good advice, but irrelevant to the question of performance :-) I thought it might be helpful to clean up the code step-by-step, so that the OP (and anyone else interested) could see how this worked out in practice.
You can browse the changes I've made through the GitHub website, but it will be easier to make a checkout and browse it with the Gitk history viewer (or GitX if you're on OS X). To make a checkout, use the following command:
git clone git://github.com/pozorvlak/microarray.git
The program now depends on some library modules from CPAN (Perl's killer feature). To install these, and their dependencies, do the following:
-
Install cpanminus, using one or other of these commands:
curl -L http://cpanmin.us | perl - --self-upgrade wget -O - http://cpanmin.us | perl - --self-upgrade -
Use cpanminus to fetch the dependencies specified in Makefile.PL
~/perl5/bin/cpanm .
That's it! You'll note that cpanminus also runs the tests for all the modules it fetches, and the tests (OK, test) for this distribution (in t/).
The semantics aren't exactly the same: previously, the program ignored everything in its input before the last line starting with "probes". This was almost certainly a bug, so I've changed it to ignore lines starting with "probes" (presumably header lines), read numeric data from every other line, and die if any non-header lines contain non-numeric data.
You may also be interested in the following articles, in which Mark Jason Dominus applies similar cleanups to some beginners' Perl scripts.
http://www.perl.com/pub/2000/04/raceinfo.html
http://www.perl.com/pub/2000/06/commify.html
http://perl.plover.com/yak/flags/
Have fun!