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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. ;-)


In reply to So, just what exactly is it about Perl? by smullis

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