Re: I think Perl ruined me as a programmer

[BrowserUk]

in reply to I think Perl ruined me as a programmer

but I'm saying Perl has made me not want to tolerate unnecessary restrictions and unnecessary keystrokes.

Every now and again I encounter someone saying something that, once I read it, I feel I've been trying to say in a dozen different ways for months or years.

Dispite all my dilettantism with half a dozen other languages of various flavours over the last couple of years, I still find myself reverting to Perl when I want to get something done. It's not that there aren't nice features in each of those other languages, things that I wish I had access to from Perl. It's that I don't miss those things in Perl anywhere near as much as the bits of Perl I miss when I am in those other languages.

Moreover, I resent the hoops those other languages make me jump through to get things done that are just so easy in Perl.

[w-ber]

I still find myself reverting to Perl when I want to get something done.

Amen.

If you think about it, Perl is a horrible mess. The implementation is the definition, and although both have had a benevolent dictator drawing guidelines, there's layers of fixes on fixes in both the language and the implementation. The documentation is full of exceptions to the rules it tries to describe. The core language is quite huge, even if you don't have to know all of it, and the built-in function list makes many programmers of other programming languages shudder.

Yet the reason it is effective in solving various practical problems is precisely because solutions to practical problems have been made easy. If you want to find all strings matching certain description, just write the description as a regular expression and use it. No need to load libraries or fight with baroque syntax. If you want to loop over all lines in a text file, just use the diamond operator. Although this isn't part of the language implementation, if you don't want to solve a problem again, download a module for CPAN.

Perl is not pretty, but it's the best tool I know of. If I were a driver or operating system programmer, I would probably make similar arguments in favour of C (which is not a nice programming language but also gets the job done).

[Jenda]

Well, compared to PHP the list of builtin functions is pretty small. Though it's true there are a few that should not be in the core.