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Most decent computer languages are heavily inspired by theoretical linguistics. So education tends towards that. Perl is inspired by practical linguistics. I
by singingfish 8y ago
Most decent computer languages are heavily inspired by theoretical linguistics. So education tends towards that. Perl is inspired by practical linguistics. It's a total mess like English and amazingly expressive like English. This doesn't fit well with standard computing paradigms, but it does make perl a decent language for people from non-standard backgrounds.
- lizmat 8y ago> perl a decent language for people from non-standard backgrounds I would argue "for any background". Why would you have to think like a computer to be able to program? Don't we have computers to do that?
- singingfish 8y agoA lot of people from "standard backgrounds" have the theoretical linguistics approach baked in to their literacy. Perl on the other hand has a much easier time adapting to varying thinking styles. Here's a comment I made about a former colleague's code earlier today: > one thing people like about perl is it can shoehorn into pretty much any mental model. [ colleague ]'s model is quite solid but also pretty mental There's something to be said for enforcing a certain kind of mental model. Java and C# do a terrible job of this. Python does a reasonable job. Ruby is just perl done differently - seems to make the "mental" part a bit easier. Personally aside from perl the programming I've most enjoyed is arduino flavoured C, but that's just for fun. I do perl for fun and profit.