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I think it's admirable you're considering this, and willing to make conscious choices. I'm in a situation with some similarities and can appreciate the difficulty. It looks like you have some questions which have implications for whether to 'restructure' or not: I'm not sure where this stands in importance to my actual career, development as a hacker, ability, skill and any possible problems that may result from this approach down the line Career: You might find Tim Bunce's job trend graphs interesting. Genarally, being great at Perl can do wonders for your career. I myself have saved lots of time by automating tasks using Perl (which would have been hard-to-impossible to automate in other languages). If availability of jobs is of utmost importance then spending some time on Java might be wise (likely you'll need to for your B.Comp.Sci. anyway) Development as a hacker: I can't emphasize enough how much becoming a Perl 'expert' will do for your growth as a hacker. 'Perl is, in intent, a cleaned up and summarized version of that wonderful semi-natural language known as "Unix"' (Larry Wall). As such, it's a great choice for a budding hacker. And since Perl 5, it's even better than that. Perl now shares six of Lisp's seven distinguishing features. When you're ready, take on Dominus' Higher Order Perl. Learning these features of Perl 5 will give you a head start on two very powerful languages: Lisp (including its variants), and Perl 6. And do learn to write readable code. I consider 'ability' and 'skill' subsets of 'development as a hacker'. Problems: In general, how do you feel about spending (maybe) half of the next 175,200 hours in front of a computer? Imagine yourself at age 48 (happy birthday, BTW :). Would you have any regrets about having spent that much of your life that particular way? Another potential problem I highly recommend you think through is your health. Spending 12 hours a day sitting and typing can mess up your posture, give you RSI, and cause a bunch of other problems. If you go down this path, spend $1000 or so on a damn good chair (you'll recover this cost many times over in income you don't lose because you don't have RSI, hospital bills you don't pay because your spine is healthy, and most of all - not feeling miserable after sitting all day). Yet another thing: do you exercise regularly? Sitting in front of a screen so much will exact a toll on your body. Your body may not require 'payment' for 20 years, but it surely will. Exercising regularly in some form can reduce (or eliminate, if you choose well your exercise) this toll. I hope some of that helps you think about the issues involved in this choice. Whatever you can do or dream you can, begin it. Boldness has genius, power, and magic in it. Life is denied by lack of attention, whether it be to cleaning windows or trying to write a masterpiece... -- Nadia Boulanger In reply to Re: Structured Learning of Perl, Important or Not?
by missingthepoint
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