lol...um...I was pretty much told not to bother with it, maybe learn a bare minimum...then focus on php...I take it you have good reasons for diving into perl? this isn't just a hobby, eh?
Yes. My boss has some very high profile and high traffic sites that are powered by Perl and I'm going to be helping to support them so I'm doing my current hobby project with it as a way of getting more adept with the language.
PHP I am already experienced in, but it's not a real language- it's a very good server-side scripting language, as long as you're not too hopeful about Object-Orientation, but you wouldn't want to use it for anything else, whereas Perl is a powerful and very widely used scripting language that is particularly handy for text munging. A surprising amount of the software that runs the web is written in Perl.
For the same job, given the choice, I would surely work with Ruby- all the dynamic convenience of a powerful scripting language along with true object-orientation, a potent web framework in Rails and a wonderful way of getting out of the way and letting you do what you need to. Also it has the advantage over Perl that it's not totally insane.
Seriously, Perl has all these magically appearing arrays that suddenly appear when you create a new subroutine and various levels of indirection that mean that although you're never having to deal with pointer arithmetic ( the reason that life as a C or C++ programmer is effectively purgatory ) it can be kind of tricky to work out whether you're working with a value or a reference to that value or a magical array that has come out of nowhere in a sparkle of fairy dust.
I find it infuriating. Probably when I get better at using it I will hate it less.
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Date: 27 Jul 2007 23:52 (UTC)no subject
Date: 28 Jul 2007 00:45 (UTC)no subject
Date: 28 Jul 2007 22:17 (UTC)PHP I am already experienced in, but it's not a real language- it's a very good server-side scripting language, as long as you're not too hopeful about Object-Orientation, but you wouldn't want to use it for anything else, whereas Perl is a powerful and very widely used scripting language that is particularly handy for text munging. A surprising amount of the software that runs the web is written in Perl.
For the same job, given the choice, I would surely work with Ruby- all the dynamic convenience of a powerful scripting language along with true object-orientation, a potent web framework in Rails and a wonderful way of getting out of the way and letting you do what you need to. Also it has the advantage over Perl that it's not totally insane.
Seriously, Perl has all these magically appearing arrays that suddenly appear when you create a new subroutine and various levels of indirection that mean that although you're never having to deal with pointer arithmetic ( the reason that life as a C or C++ programmer is effectively purgatory ) it can be kind of tricky to work out whether you're working with a value or a reference to that value or a magical array that has come out of nowhere in a sparkle of fairy dust.
I find it infuriating. Probably when I get better at using it I will hate it less.
no subject
Date: 28 Jul 2007 23:12 (UTC)what's really scary is how very little of that I understood. :-)
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Date: 30 Jul 2007 10:30 (UTC)Pesky!