[sf-perl] [meeting] Pegex and Acmeism

[Joseph Brenner]

Rich Morin <rdm at cfcl.com> wrote:
> Joseph Brenner wrote:
>> That's one of the reasons that I think the "mental exercise"
>> argument for learning another language is pretty weak.  I'm
>> someone who's more-or-less a "perl programmer", but I
>> couldn't avoid using a half-dozen languages (of one sort or
>> another) if I wanted to.  And I could easily spend my life
>> getting mental exercise by learning my way around new CPAN
>> modules.
>
>  "A language that doesn't affect the way you think about
>   programming, is not worth knowing."

Just for arguments sake, I would suggest adopting a different
methodology is what that's really about, where the assumption is that
the language is going to bring that with it.  But you can do something
similar with a bit of discipline ("This time, let's do this with
callbacks and closures instead of objects").

> However, I think there _is_ something to be learned from a
> language that approaches things very differently than the
> ones you already know.

Sure, and left to my own devices I'd be more interested in
scheme/guile than small variations of perl.  Or maybe erlang or go or
something.