Hey All!
Being a relative newcomer to the collected seekers of wisdom browsing this excellent site I ponder on exactly what is it that makes Perl have such a vibrant community and faithful following?
I see the same names lurking (is that the right word? ;-) around this site, offering suggestion, advice and other words of encouragement. It's really great!! I suppose this can only stem from the intrinsic qualities of the language itself. As I become more and more familiar with the subtleties and awsome flexibility of this great language - and more keenly aware every day of how much more there is to learn - I wonder if my feelings are shared by the rest of you...
From simple one-liners via the unbridled joy that is CPAN to Mr. Conways voyages into the wonderful world of OO there seems to be something for everyone.
I imagine there were a couple of prevalent points of entry for those of us here:
1. ksh / sh / bash just don't cut it anymore.
- We're fed up of having to write to temp files (/tmp/$0.$$
anyone?) to be able to reference the results from within for
loops later in our scripts.
- Even when trying to compensate with bash builtins ( such as $(< $file) instead of catand so on.) the performance is just not good enough.
And sometimes... it matters.
- Three (and a bit) words: no multi-dimensional arrays
- "Data-structures? We don't need no steenkin' data-structures!" - Ummmm... Actually? We do.
2. Needed a prototyping lanuage? Blown away by the rapid development speed?
- You'll have to help me here... This is not where I'm from...
Is there "a third way"?
And finally:
For the third morning in a row I woke up today after having a
particularly strange Perl related dream (this one was about
typeglobs).... this thing is getting to me!!
Should I seek professional help?
Cheers
SM
....still putting the Monk into Monkey....
PS. As some of you read this, sagely shaking your head and smiling to yourself at the burblings of a Perl adolescent, let me reassure you that I realised that I could be following the ever so typical profile of a newish Perl user ... "they alway post something like this at around Level 4".
Ah well. I'll post it anyway. ;-)
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