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Randal Schwartz's "Learning Perl" was one of the easiest and most entertaining introductions to any language I've ever read.

by 321abc 17y ago

rjurney 17y ago
Yes, that book is great. Just a joke about Perl's relative syntactic obscurity. I love me some Perl because of the elegance and power the operators provide me, but its murder on a noob, especially if its not great code.
- 321abc 17y ago
  The same could be said of any language. Perl's just gotten beat up on by fans of certain other upstart languages that want to steal some of Perl's glory. In five or ten years there'll be some other language fad, and those languages will get their turn at being the whipping boy.
  - rjurney 17y ago
    The same could be said of... LISP. But few languages are as syntacticly confusing as Perl are to the uninitiated. Thats just how it is, eh?
    - 321abc 17y ago
      Whether it's "confusing" is entirely subjective. I found Perl's syntax quite straightforward, having already been familiar with shell scripts, regular expressions, and sed (not to mention a variety of other languages I'd learned). But I suppose I was not your typical newbie programmer when I started learning Perl. Maybe Perl wouldn't make for the ideal first language, but it's certainly not nearly as difficult as assembly, certain functional languages, or even C/C++.
  - berntb 17y ago
    >and [Python, Ruby] will get their turn at being the whipping boy. I don't know about that. I think a large reason for the fan boys' FUD against Perl is that the three languages are quite similar. Competition. Edit: What I mean is, the coming new languages will probably be quite different and fill different ecological niches. You can make a good argument that today with Moose/CPAN etc, Perl 5 is hard-to-beat as a development environment. The main disadvantage IMHO is that it is a lot to learn. I really don't know what good can be said about PHP though, which is eating all three's lunch. (-: What was Larry Wall's quote? "Takes worse is better to new depths". :-)
    - 321abc 17y ago
      According to this graph of job ads over the last five years, PHP is more popular than Python and Ruby, but only half as popular as Perl: http://www.indeed.com/jobtrends?q=perl%2C+python%2C+ruby%2C+php&l= http://www.indeed.com/jobtrends?q=perl%2C+python%2C+ruby%2C+...
  - ubernostrum 17y ago
    "Perl's just gotten beat up on by fans of certain other upstart languages that want to steal some of Perl's glory." Or... maybe there's a kernel of truth in it? Yes, all languages have weird gotchas and corner cases. But there are times when Perl seems to go out of its way to have as many as it can manage, which turns the process of learning Perl into a long campaign of trial-and-error experiments and rote memorization. It's sort of like trying to find a consistent pattern in the naming of PHP's built-in functions, except it applies to the entire language.
    - berntb 17y ago
      Perl is inspired a bit by natural languages. It is certainly harder to learn than some other languages. The Perl Best Practices book is needed for all teams (it saves on long discussions; "this page list what we do different to PBP").

Randal Schwartz's "Learning Perl" was one of the easiest and most entertaining introductions to any language I've ever read.

by 321abc 17y ago

Randal Schwartz's "Learning Perl" was one of the easiest and most entertaining introductions to any language I've ever read.

rjurney 17y ago

Yes, that book is great. Just a joke about Perl's relative syntactic obscurity. I love me some Perl because of the elegance and power the operators provide me, but its murder on a noob, especially if its not great code.

321abc 17y ago
The same could be said of any language. Perl's just gotten beat up on by fans of certain other upstart languages that want to steal some of Perl's glory. In five or ten years there'll be some other language fad, and those languages will get their turn at being the whipping boy.
- rjurney 17y ago
  The same could be said of... LISP. But few languages are as syntacticly confusing as Perl are to the uninitiated. Thats just how it is, eh?
  - 321abc 17y ago
    Whether it's "confusing" is entirely subjective. I found Perl's syntax quite straightforward, having already been familiar with shell scripts, regular expressions, and sed (not to mention a variety of other languages I'd learned). But I suppose I was not your typical newbie programmer when I started learning Perl. Maybe Perl wouldn't make for the ideal first language, but it's certainly not nearly as difficult as assembly, certain functional languages, or even C/C++.
- berntb 17y ago
  >and [Python, Ruby] will get their turn at being the whipping boy. I don't know about that. I think a large reason for the fan boys' FUD against Perl is that the three languages are quite similar. Competition. Edit: What I mean is, the coming new languages will probably be quite different and fill different ecological niches. You can make a good argument that today with Moose/CPAN etc, Perl 5 is hard-to-beat as a development environment. The main disadvantage IMHO is that it is a lot to learn. I really don't know what good can be said about PHP though, which is eating all three's lunch. (-: What was Larry Wall's quote? "Takes worse is better to new depths". :-)
  - 321abc 17y ago
    According to this graph of job ads over the last five years, PHP is more popular than Python and Ruby, but only half as popular as Perl: http://www.indeed.com/jobtrends?q=perl%2C+python%2C+ruby%2C+php&l= http://www.indeed.com/jobtrends?q=perl%2C+python%2C+ruby%2C+...
- ubernostrum 17y ago
  "Perl's just gotten beat up on by fans of certain other upstart languages that want to steal some of Perl's glory." Or... maybe there's a kernel of truth in it? Yes, all languages have weird gotchas and corner cases. But there are times when Perl seems to go out of its way to have as many as it can manage, which turns the process of learning Perl into a long campaign of trial-and-error experiments and rote memorization. It's sort of like trying to find a consistent pattern in the naming of PHP's built-in functions, except it applies to the entire language.
  - berntb 17y ago
    Perl is inspired a bit by natural languages. It is certainly harder to learn than some other languages. The Perl Best Practices book is needed for all teams (it saves on long discussions; "this page list what we do different to PBP").