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posted by Fnord666 on Thursday October 12 2017, @01:07AM   Printer-friendly
from the There’s-more-than-one-way-to-do-it,-but-sometimes-consistency-is-not-a-bad-thing-either dept.

Ruth Holloway at Red Hat's marketing site, OpenSource.com, has a retrospective on three decades of perl covering some history and a few of the top user groups. The powerful and flexible scripting language perl turns 30 at the end of this year. It is a practical extraction and reporting language widely used even today and has a dedicated community. It's ease of use and power made it the go-to tool through the boom of the 90's and 00's when the WWW was growing exponentially. However, its flexible syntax, while often an advantage, also functions as a sort of Rorschach test. One that some programmers fail. Perhaps two of its main strengths are pattern matching and CPAN. The many, mature perl modules available from CPAN make it a first choice for many when needed to draft something quickly or deal with a quick task.


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  • (Score: 4, Insightful) by The Mighty Buzzard on Thursday October 12 2017, @09:05AM (7 children)

    by The Mighty Buzzard (18) Subscriber Badge <themightybuzzard@proton.me> on Thursday October 12 2017, @09:05AM (#581039) Homepage Journal

    The trick to learning any language is only learn the bits that are useful to you at the moment, then use them. It won't make you an expert overnight but it will make you a $language coder overnight. Expertise in perl, like in anything, only comes after lots of real-world use.

    --
    My rights don't end where your fear begins.
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  • (Score: 1, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday October 12 2017, @09:48AM (6 children)

    by Anonymous Coward on Thursday October 12 2017, @09:48AM (#581056)

    It's amazing how much better you'll be as a programmer if you just read the fucking manual from cover to cover.

    I did that with Perl many years ago, and found that after a week, I was indistinguishable from the experts in IRC channels, forums, and mailing lists, and I was even able to correct long-time users, and even make meaningful contributions to discussions about the evolution of the language.

    Of course, after dropping Perl, I quickly forgot it all, but the point remains: Taking a big gulp goes a long way toward allowing you to think in any particular language; small sips tend to make a you script kiddie who blindly copies/pastes from StackOverflow.

    • (Score: 2) by The Mighty Buzzard on Thursday October 12 2017, @10:25AM (2 children)

      by The Mighty Buzzard (18) Subscriber Badge <themightybuzzard@proton.me> on Thursday October 12 2017, @10:25AM (#581068) Homepage Journal

      Nah. There's value in spending some RTFM time as well but if you think you haven't forgotten over half of what you just read over the course of reading a programming language manual, you're sadly mistaken.

      --
      My rights don't end where your fear begins.
      • (Score: 2) by Phoenix666 on Thursday October 12 2017, @11:03AM (1 child)

        by Phoenix666 (552) on Thursday October 12 2017, @11:03AM (#581080) Journal

        I find I have to RTFM more broadly every 4-5 years when an occasion arises to write more perl in bulk, because in between I mostly use it as a glue-/scripting language and there's a bit of a palimpsest effect that sets in after using other languages.

        --
        Washington DC delenda est.
    • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday October 12 2017, @10:42AM (2 children)

      by Anonymous Coward on Thursday October 12 2017, @10:42AM (#581074)

      Small sips over a period of time allows you to make mistakes, learn, enjoy yourself and bed the knowledge in deeply. I can still work in C or Lisp having barely touched them for years.

      But sounds like reading a manual cover to cover allows you to be a know-it-all on IRC? If that's your thing, then go for it.

      • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday October 12 2017, @02:14PM (1 child)

        by Anonymous Coward on Thursday October 12 2017, @02:14PM (#581133)

        It's not uncommon for an ass to be a know-it-all, but not every know-it-all is an ass.

        Only a fool scoffs at someone for knowing it all.

        • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday October 12 2017, @03:35PM

          by Anonymous Coward on Thursday October 12 2017, @03:35PM (#581168)

          I scoff at your Pearl of wisdom.