I've had co-workers that never wrote POD, and that was probably the worst. But the next worst are the people that inline their POD. I really cannot stand inline POD. Apparently I am not alone. Mike Friedman expresses it at least as well as I can so I'll leave it at that.

Well, almost. He says one odd thing:

  If someone's looking at your code, it's because they need more information 
  than the documentation or interface itself can provide.

I don't think this is even half true. I often look at Perl code that has perfectly good (and non-inline) POD. Almost always because I'm less interested in the public interface than I am interested in how that interface was written. What fun is software development if all you do is work with the public interface of blackbox libraries? It's much more interesting to see what's going on behind the scenes and actually learn something new, right?

So the author of one of the best books written for Perl has been writing a series of articles for IBM developerWorks about the greatest text editor ever invented. I've always been a little embarrassed about my lack of knowledge (ignorance) regarding Vim. Occasionally I pick up new tidbits about it but if you compared my vimrc today to my vimrc seven or eight years ago it would look about the same. I have even bought a book about Vim that I continually put off reading.

I am announcing now that I fully intend on reading and comprehending these articles (this is not a complete list of the articles in the series, only the articles that had been published at the time I wrote this blog entry. If you click here you will get a listing of all articles published for this series): 1, 2, 3, 4, 5