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A consideration to you: You spent 4 years of learning Perl, 4 years in which you likely also massively improved your skills as a programmer, regardless of the

A consideration to you: You spent 4 years of learning Perl, 4 years in which you likely also massively improved your skills as a programmer, regardless of the Perl angle. Then you went to Python, bringing in your programmer experience, probably started off with a good book and had a much happier time. So, do challenge yourself and ponder how much of that come from having spent 4 years programming, and how much from actual differences in the languages?

ghshephard 12y ago
It's an interesting perspective, but, seriously - for the life of me, I struggled every time I wanted to declare/parse/initialize an AoH or HoA on perl. And I'm not engaging in hyperbole when I said that my code was basically completely foreign to me a week after writing it. Obviously developers (which I am not), and people with more discipline and structure, and write eminently readable and maintainable perl code - but as my day job was network engineering, I was just looking for the lowest cost path to get the job done. I really did love CPAN though.
- kbenson 12y ago
  That's interesting, because defining an AoH or HoA in Perl is almost identical to how you would do it in Javascript, which is to say it looks a lot like JSON. If it was the access and assignment semantics, the normal case is also fairly straightforward; use curly braces for hash/dict keys, square brackets for array indices. E.g. my %data = ( foo => [ { bar => 10, baz => 12 }, { bar => 20, baz => 13 }, { bar => 30, baz => 14 }, ], ); print $data{foo}[2]{bar}; # 30 push $data{foo}, { bar => 40, baz => 15 }; Given, using array and hash references with the built-in push,pop,shift,unshift,keys,values and each used to require some annoying dereferencing that could be confusing. Do you still find that confusing?
  - ghshephard 12y ago
    I'll admit to not having looked at it for about 12 years, and, of course, I'm not saying I couldn't figure out after 2-3 minutes over looking over the pattern, but it just never flowed the way it did with Python for me. data ={} data['foo']= [ {'bar':10,'baz':12}, {'bar':20,'baz':13}, {'bar':30,'baz':14} ] print data['foo'][2]['bar'] data['foo'].append({'bar':40,'baz':15}) for x in data['foo']: print x['bar'] Maybe it had something to do with indices always being [] brackets and {} only being used to define the dict structure. Or maybe it got easier sometime in the last 12 years? Or, maybe you could onto something, and having come pre-primed with knowledge hashes/arrays, I just picked up python more quickly. Anyways, it was just a personal story told as well as I could remember it.

ghshephard 12y ago

It's an interesting perspective, but, seriously - for the life of me, I struggled every time I wanted to declare/parse/initialize an AoH or HoA on perl. And I'm not engaging in hyperbole when I said that my code was basically completely foreign to me a week after writing it. Obviously developers (which I am not), and people with more discipline and structure, and write eminently readable and maintainable perl code - but as my day job was network engineering, I was just looking for the lowest cost path to get the job done. I really did love CPAN though.

kbenson 12y ago
That's interesting, because defining an AoH or HoA in Perl is almost identical to how you would do it in Javascript, which is to say it looks a lot like JSON. If it was the access and assignment semantics, the normal case is also fairly straightforward; use curly braces for hash/dict keys, square brackets for array indices. E.g. my %data = ( foo => [ { bar => 10, baz => 12 }, { bar => 20, baz => 13 }, { bar => 30, baz => 14 }, ], ); print $data{foo}[2]{bar}; # 30 push $data{foo}, { bar => 40, baz => 15 }; Given, using array and hash references with the built-in push,pop,shift,unshift,keys,values and each used to require some annoying dereferencing that could be confusing. Do you still find that confusing?
- ghshephard 12y ago
  I'll admit to not having looked at it for about 12 years, and, of course, I'm not saying I couldn't figure out after 2-3 minutes over looking over the pattern, but it just never flowed the way it did with Python for me. data ={} data['foo']= [ {'bar':10,'baz':12}, {'bar':20,'baz':13}, {'bar':30,'baz':14} ] print data['foo'][2]['bar'] data['foo'].append({'bar':40,'baz':15}) for x in data['foo']: print x['bar'] Maybe it had something to do with indices always being [] brackets and {} only being used to define the dict structure. Or maybe it got easier sometime in the last 12 years? Or, maybe you could onto something, and having come pre-primed with knowledge hashes/arrays, I just picked up python more quickly. Anyways, it was just a personal story told as well as I could remember it.