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> - Perl For me, Python. I knew Perl was the "leet" language and was determined to add its power to my toolkit. I made several (three, I think) weeks-long in
by dkarl 6y ago
> - Perl
For me, Python. I knew Perl was the "leet" language and was determined to add its power to my toolkit. I made several (three, I think) weeks-long intensive efforts to master it. Every time, I read the book, read PerlMonks every day, did exercises, and got to the point of writing useful scripts using pretty powerful features. I'd think "I've finally got it!" and would be a Perl programmer for a while, but eventually a few weeks would go by without any need to use Perl, and it would turn to mush in my mind, and I'd have to start over again at the beginning.
One day in 2000 I was yet again failing to do things in Perl that had felt easy six weeks ago, and I thought, "Huh, I think I remember how to do this in that language Python I fiddled with for a few minutes once after reading some blog post." I started typing Python and was very quickly able to get it working.
I didn't really want to write such easy, bland, straightforward code. I wanted to be a wizard who could do amazing things with a few cryptic characters. Writing Python was like doing a magic trick while simultaneously explaining exactly how the trick was done. It reduced my style points to zero. But I liked how easy it was, and Perl kept brutally showing me that I wasn't cut out to be a wizard.
Twenty years later, and Python is still an important part of my toolkit.
- thraxil 6y agoYeah, I switched to Python in 2002-2003ish when I started noticing that all the interesting new things I was seeing were using it (and I had to do some scientific/graphics stuff where Numpy and PyGame were much nicer than any of the Perl options). I probably haven't written any Perl in 15 years now, but I have to respect it for what it was at the time. When I learned Perl in 1996 or so, I didn't even own a computer; I just had access to a shell account on the university's unix server that I could telnet into from any computer lab. I basically got started by reading manpages. As hard as that was, it was far more accessible to me than figuring out how to get whatever weird C compiler there was on there working or getting a machine in the one computer lab that had a Java IDE installed on the desktops. The "wizard" aspect was part of what eventually drove me away from Perl as well. I was never really into the whole JAPH/golf thing and I worked hard to write Perl that was well structured and readable, and there were plenty of other Perl programmers like me. But there was also always that part of the community that wanted things to be as obscure and obfuscated as possible and they were very visible. Python's complete rejection of that was really refreshing.