Is Perl a write only language?
I am sick and tired of hearing this, so let's put it this to the test. Assume you know little of Perl, or any programming language for that matter. Can you parse the code?
https://chrisarg.github.io/Killing-It-with-PERL/2023/12/06/Is-Perl-a-write-only-language.html
I hope the piece above is the first in a series to convince people to consider the reality before passing judgement. It was inspired by one of our research analysts discovering Perl and awk to simplify their lives when cleaning data.
I like to use Perl for material other than text.
Perl isn't hard, the people teaching that it is are just incompetent. Those who can't do, teach. Maybe if we want our future generations of coders to be able to code worth a damn we should start having them taught by people who CAN do instead.
Hey, that's a pretty broad brush you're painting with, and I take personal offense at that, and I'm sure many of my fellow instructors would be similarly offended.
That's nice. You earn your living by people thinking it's hard, so even if I cared that you were offended (I don't, that's your choice not my problem) I wouldn't lend an assertion that it is hard from you any credence.
I actually don't. I made a lot of money helping people figure out how easy Perl is. So I consider *that* statement of yours also disrespectful of the truth.
You realize you just said the same thing as me, yeah? If they didn't think it was hard to start with, there would be no need to give you money to show them otherwise. Which means you have a financial interest in the majority continuing to think it's hard.
And I did originally say that the ones who were "teaching that it is [hard]" are the incompetent ones. Which you took offense to. Which lead me to assume you were one of the ones doing so, otherwise you would not have felt insulted.
Now you may be the most honest, upright Joe out there but I don't know you and it would be foolish for me to just take you at your word that you have only pure motives and a righteous character after all of that.
He signed his name, with a link to his home page, and Google is your friend. Maybe don't make assumptions about people you don't know without putting in 30 seconds of effort first? I'm pretty sure that if you didn't learn Perl from a book Randal authored or co-authored, you learned it from someone who did. Imagine how much harder it would have been to learn if those books didn't exist?
I've been writing it professionally longer than he's been an author.
But that has nothing to do with understanding why in the world he's objecting to saying teachers who tell their students perl is hard should not be teaching computer programming courses.
Perl is not hard. Reading code written by idiots is hard no matter the language and Perl had a pretty good run of being the go-to scripting language, so of course a lot of them wrote in it.
No, I stand by what I said. They're either too incompetent to learn a very easy language or they're talking out of their ass without the experience to even make such a judgment.
Cool! I'm curious, what version of Perl did you start with, and what did you learn it from? I started with Perl 4 around 1993, learning from a co-worker and from "Programming Perl" (aka "the camel book") by Wall and Schwartz.
Perl 3 back in 90 professionally, though it wasn't by any means the entire job description. My first paying job that didn't include anything except Perl coding was a billing system for a MMO back in 97. Perl 4, in case you were wondering. It was done well before the game was though, so don't go scratching your head over which MMO was even around back in 97. As far as I know there was pretty much only UO already released in 97, Everquest and a whole bunch that didn't last nearly as long (including the one I wrote for) didn't show up until 98.
Yeah, I've read The Camel Book and even still have my original copy. It's an outstanding book. Doesn't mean I know Larry and Randal well enough to call them by their first names or anything though, only what I see in print or video like most everyone else. At home they could be discrete serial killers that really enjoy quilting for all I know.
I wasn't even trying to rip on him, so much as get him to think. If all the comp-sci teachers out there are telling their students that perl is write-only line noise, it's harming the language (a language I happen to quite enjoy writing in) because of their own shortfalls rather than those of the language.
Sorry, missed a bit. I learned it on the fly from other people's code, the documentation on the systems, and asking coworkers like a whole lot of us did back in the day. I've never taken a class or read a book to learn a language.
For the past couple decades I've been just deciding to learn $foo and then immediately starting to write an IRC bot in it. I just keep adding extra functions and tweaking it until I think I've learned enough for now or until something else catches my eye.
I did buy quite a few books for reference before online language documentation was ubiquitous so my brain wouldn't have to hold everything itself right from the start though. They have the advantage of being easily findable and able to squash a spider in a pinch. The Camel Book and C By Dissection are probably my favorites in my collection.
Read again, that is not what I said.
Oh, I see. I completely misread that, and probably so did Randal. Under that misreading, your first reply to Randal reads like a doubling down on that apparent position, when actually that response is just prioritizing overtly demonstrating disregard for people’s responses to you over figuring out why they responded that way – and with that, the scene is set for a waste of everybody’s time.
Appears that way now, yep.
Python is the go-to language nowadays and I see lots of bad Python code just because too many people are coding in it (often with an LLM)