[Melbourne-pm] perl is a terrible language to learn

[Toby Corkindale]

On Thu, Sep 18, 2008 at 12:01:55AM +1000, John Thornton wrote:
> 
>        Where are the rules in this dog's breakfast called Perl??
> 
>        I think that it is a terrible language to learn. I am enjoying
> learning Java instead. 
> 
>        Perl reminds me of when I studied VCE geography. I studied the
> theories on why cities grow into shapes. There was the ring theory. Then
> there was this smart alec theory that basically said "there are no rules at
> all, the city just grows" and that's like Perl.
> 
>        It's bye to Perl. I already see far more logic in Java.

I see analogies between Perl, and the English language.

English is a hard language, full of contradictions and exceptions to rules.
It has borrowed from many other languages, wilfully stealing some of the best
bits, discarding the rest, and carelessly mutating over time.
Although hard to learn, English is still an efficient language to express
oneself in, and has been the choice of language for a great number of epic
works.

The same can be said for Perl.

Unfortunately, it really isn't helping us win any converts.
It's hard to get up and running on Windows; it doesn't integrate with web
servers terribly well. It is really difficult to embed in other programs
(compared to Python and .Net).
However, it really has taken some of the better aspects of many other
programing languages and integrated them. It has a massive library of
freely-available modules which do almost anything you can think of. You can
develop applications in Perl in no time at all. It's quite lightweight compared
to .net and java in terms of resource requirements.

-Toby

-- 
Turning and turning in the widening gyre/The falcon cannot hear the falconer;
Things fall apart, the centre cannot hold/Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world
(gpg --recv-key B1CCF88E)