[Melbourne-pm] perl on VTC

[Myf White]

On Thu, Sep 18, 2008 at 12:36 PM, Ben Hare <benhare at gmail.com> wrote:

> there are already many Perl tutorials online and... camel book, camel
> book, camel book! as everyone has said already.
>
>
The Camel book is comprehensive, but I think of it as more a reference for
developers already familiar with the basics. The Llama book is a better one
for learning the basics. Another good introductory book which I used when I
was starting to learn Perl is Beginning Perl, which is available for free
online:
http://www.perl.org/books/beginning-perl/

John, it's great to hear that you're enjoying learning Java. I hope you come
back to Perl at a later time. Not to say "my language of choice is better",
but the reasons I like Perl are:

a) CPAN, which is an awesome resource. I had a problem the other day when
someone sent me a python script to work on which used a module which took me
15 minutes to track down through google...

b) it doesn't force you into a particular way of approaching a problem...
any way that you naturally think about a problem will translate into Perl
(as long as the way you think about it is logical - which is usually the
hard part). Because of this, you can spend the time that you're programming
thinking about the problem domain rather than the language. I find with
other languages, the hardest part is learning to think in the way that the
language forces you to. I find that as I learn more and read more of other
people's code, I can now think of lots of different ways of doing something,
whereas when I was beginning, I usually only had one way. TMTOWTDI means
that I'm always searching for an elusive "most elegant way of doing x"

c) A lot of common things are really easy in Perl ... regular expressions
are either not available or an absolute nightmare in the other languages
I've used. File i/o is simple and quick in perl - in java it's not hard but
it does take a lot more keystrokes. I like it that strings and integers and
booleans are not a pain to convert.

d) I like "do or die" - it can be a bit clumsy sometimes but I find it
neater than try catches Java. I also like that it's optional...Java wont
even compile if you don't catch thrown exceptions. Sometimes you want
something quick and dirty to do something once and you don't care that much
if it dies.

e) There's lots of sugary sweetness from other languages sprinkled over
everything.


Myf White
mailto:myfwhite at gmail.com

Work like you don't need the money. Love like you've never been hurt. Dance
like nobody's watching.
~ Satchel Paige
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