1. Each Perl module file needs to declare pragmas at the top of the file for them to have any effect. This is irritating. All this time I thought I was coding in modern perl, with strict and warnings enabled. Adding those things back has been a PITA. At least this time I was smart enough to build a test suite.
  2. Test::More doesn't handle UTF8 well at all. Because of how it duplicates the standard file handles, you can't easily change STDOUT etc to handle UTF8.
I have a code base built for PHP 5.3, but due to circumstances (and morons) beyond my control I've been forced to backport it to PHP 5.2. There are some nasty surprises not documented in the normal places. __DIR__ define('APP_ROOT', dirname(__DIR__)); doesn't work because __DIR__ isn't defined in 5.2.
Maybe I don't understand xQuery enough yet. I've only been working with it for a little while, and it's a very strange, arcane language. But I don't understand why these two functions return different results. The text between the smiley parentheses should be a comment, ignored by the parser and not output. But it isn't ignored.