a good career choice ?

[Albert Schlef]

When I read some parts of Perl's man pages I get the feeling they wink
at me saying "ha ha! ha ha! use this syntax. Why? Oh, that's complicate
to explain. Tim knows, Tim knows. Or buy the Holy book of the Camel, the
masters are explaining it there. ha ha!"

Oops, pardon me. I didn't notice your name too is Tim. I was referring
here to one Tim famous in the Perl community. Well, actually I'm not
sure that was his name, it was a long time ago.

 

[Tim Greer]

Tim Greer wrote:
I got the impression you were making a claim that
Perl is [...] some old archaic language that people
shouldn't waste time with

13 years ago I was programming in Perl (v5). I loved it. Until I had
to return a file handle from a function.

[...]
As for returning a file handle from a function, you could do that,
but maybe it was not a method you agreed with using

I was referring to the \*HANDLE syntax. I didn't understand it. At
that time it was important for me to understand exactly what was
happening under the hood because I was trying to use Perl as a study
aid for an Operating System course. I didn't want my file handles
dup(2)licating around. The manual page gave this syntax as some
"voodoo".

Same story for Perl's OO. I wasn't a big fun of this methodology back
then, but many libraries used it so I had to understand what happens
under the hood to really master this language. There wasn't any
material on the net explaining how Perl implements its OO. That's very
different from Ruby, where you can find diagrams explaining exactly
how its OO is implemented.

When I read some parts of Perl's man pages I get the feeling they wink
at me saying "ha ha! ha ha! use this syntax. Why? Oh, that's
complicate to explain. Tim knows, Tim knows. Or buy the Holy book of
the Camel, the masters are explaining it there. ha ha!"

They even discourage you from looking at Perl's source code. "Beware
all ye who enter here". "There's no BNF, just paw your way through
the...". That's very different from Ruby where I, a relative newbie,
can easily read its source code and benefit from it.

Perl's OO isn't that great, still, and definitely wasn't back then.
And, believe me, I don't know everything about any single language (if
I did, I'd be somewhere else right now As for ruby, it pretty much
makes about the same sense as Perl or PHP code does in my view. Such
as, once you get used to the syntax and functions, you're pretty much
good to go, but there's always more involved aspects of any language.
Considering Perl 13 years ago, I definitely can understand your
grievances, and even OO Perl now isn't so hot. However, I'm not a huge
fan of OO just for the same of the methods used (not that I'm against
it either), so that doesn't bother me personally. If I wanted a better
OO language, I'd definitely not be using Perl either. I can take or
leave it, personally, so I enjoy many languages. Anyone that's a fan
of OO, I can see much more preferring the syntax of Ruby or Python,
etc. No disagreements there.

 

[Tim Greer]

Oops, pardon me. I didn't notice your name too is Tim. I was referring
here to one Tim famous in the Perl community. Well, actually I'm not
sure that was his name, it was a long time ago.

No, no, that's me... (just kidding). I thought you were being humorous.
The names that pop out to me are Larry (Wall), Randal (Schwartz), Tom
(Christiansen, and Phoenix), Tim (Bunce), and, actually many others.
Not including people that think they are the authority, that probably
wouldn't be considered as such. lol Regardless, I get what you mean.