Re^2: A proposal: new section on Perl Monks.

[Win]

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[demerphq]

Perl is a language that basically allows you to perform processes that could be described in a mathematical form. They can also be described a some level using English. It strikes me that that is a large part of what Comp-Sci is about.

Computer science is generally agreed to be the mathematical analysis, study and synthesis of algorithms. It is language agnostic to the point that the bible of CS (Art Of Programming) uses a language intended to run on a machine that nobody ever built. So you can do comp-sci type stuff in perl, but you can do it just as easily with pseudo code that cannot be processed by a computer. In fact one of the fundamental tenets of comp-sci is that so long as you have a very minimal set of specific computing capabilities you can do anything you can do in any other medium that also has those capabilities.

finding the right words to describe a task performed by Perl.

The "right words" will be the ones that the comp-sci community has chosen for the underlying algorithm being used. Occassionally the community will introduce jargon for various language specific constructs as they come up, but the truth is that the ideas all eventually trail back to comp-sci. I think you should get a book on algorithms and study it. Once you have, i think youll find that this request of yours doesnt really fit in with the site. Do we really need a section explaining "divide and conquor", "graph traversal" and the like? Any decent comp-sci algorithm textbook will explain it better than probably anybody here could.

A new section isn't going to help you in your path to enlightment. You need to go study some books on the right subjects for that.

[ysth]

It is language agnostic to the point that the bible of CS (Art Of Programming) uses a language intended to run on a machine that nobody ever built.

I've been waiting to see if anybody gets MIX running on Parrot.

[merlyn]

Are you looking for Patterns in Perl? Many attempts have been made to collect those and name those, informally and formally. Most people look at the Perl Cookbook as a canonical example. Some have taken pattern names from books like the GangOfFour and applied them to Perl, although such actions are a bit questionable, as the problems that face Perl programmers are typically not aligned with the problems that face C++ programmers (for which the GoF book was written).

If you're simply looking at pattern names, your section will probably fail, as most Perl programmers don't go about naming things.

If you're looking for something else, you should attempt to describe it, again, using some different sort of strategy. Maybe an example: put up some code, and then show what the participants would supposedly do.