2 ms·

I sort of agree, Craigslist is written in Perl, and it has to be a perfect example of a spartan get-the-job done sort of site. That said, the analogy made me s

by mustpax 18y ago

I sort of agree, Craigslist is written in Perl, and it has to be a perfect example of a spartan get-the-job done sort of site. That said, the analogy made me smile. Perl really is one of those languages, that by learning, you only learn Perl. And maybe regular expressions, but I learned about those in theory of computation class. When I learned C I learned about the tenets of the OS: the call stack, virtual memory, system calls, interrupts, all the ugly stuff. Same with Java, it gave me good appreciation of OO, because it's so fundamentally OO. Basically, these languages were educational beyond themselves. Perl, on the other hand, lets you get things done real fast in its problem domain. It also encourages some of the worst programming practices and an obsession with obscure brevity, code golf. More and more I'd just rather write everything in Python. Even though it may require 10 more lines of code, I can think about the problem in pretty much the same way I would in Perl. Plus, I can read the script afterwards, which really really helps. A deep fryer is also super-utilitarian. Can you imagine McDonalds, or any burger chain, without fries? But it really is the nutritional equivalent of Perl.

10ren 18y ago
Perl, like other scripting and late-binding languages, is very flexible ("duct tape of the internet"). Amazon is reputedly a Perl shop and it gives them agility to quickly experiment with new retailing ideas. But the knowledge they gained, and the site they built, wasn't due to Perl - it was due to them working on problems they found. Here's someone else who solves problems: http://blog.plover.com http://blog.plover.com (and who wrote Higher Order Perl). All learning is commendable, including learning from a language. But to think that knowledge comes only from existing languages is to constrain one's knowledge, and for oneself to be defined by one's tools. Languages aren't the source of intellectual nutrition; they are a conduit to it (or how could they be created in the first place?). The source is creating solutions to problems.

by mustpax 18y ago

10ren 18y ago

Perl, like other scripting and late-binding languages, is very flexible ("duct tape of the internet"). Amazon is reputedly a Perl shop and it gives them agility to quickly experiment with new retailing ideas. But the knowledge they gained, and the site they built, wasn't due to Perl - it was due to them working on problems they found. Here's someone else who solves problems: http://blog.plover.com http://blog.plover.com (and who wrote Higher Order Perl). All learning is commendable, including learning from a language. But to think that knowledge comes only from existing languages is to constrain one's knowledge, and for oneself to be defined by one's tools. Languages aren't the source of intellectual nutrition; they are a conduit to it (or how could they be created in the first place?). The source is creating solutions to problems.