[Wellington-pm] How much perl is out there?

[Grant McLean]

On Mon, 2010-05-31 at 09:34 +1200, Cliff Pratt wrote:
> On 31/05/10 09:11, Lenz Gschwendtner wrote:
> >
> > learning a new language is always worth it though but i would go for
> > a functional language in that case. it stretches your mind way more
> > and improves your day-to-day programming - in whatever language that
> > is - remarkably.
> >
> Functional? In what sense? One that works properly ('is functional') or 
> one that use functions ('procedural')?
> 
> I'm not sure that I'd agree with the last meaning. I'd always go for an 
> Object Oriented language over a procedural one, if possible.

I don't know that I'd 'always' go for OO over procedural (aka
'imperative'), but Lenz was actually talking about functional as in:

  http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Functional_programming

Functional languages include Lisp, Scheme, Haskell Erlang etc.  There
are numerous advantages to the functional programming approach and Perl
has borrowed a number of the features.  Arguably the fact that Perl
allows elements of imperative, object oriented and functional styles
(all in the same program) is one of the things that makes it seem alien
to say Java coders.

Cheers
Grant