Friend Monks,
I hope this topic wasn't beaten in the past too much, but I just got thinking (meditating) about something interesting.
Those of you who dealt with foreign language speakers for some (depends on what is a foreign language for you, of course... for me English is) time surely know what it is like to hear a person talking correctly, but not the "native way". Eg, using phrases, that, while syntactically (sp ?) and semantically correct, don't "sound right". It gets you to think that the person studied the language well, but hadn't really spoken it to native speakers much.
The same, IMHO, applies to programming languages. Languages have a "way" - a style & techniques that "seem right" to gurus. For instance, Lisp has a very specific "way". You can, and many definitely do, write C-ish code in Lisp. Sure, just bang variables all around, setf them, use do and loop instead of map and recursion, pay no attention to closures and macros, etc.
C itself also has "a way", and many others do - notably the old and established languages, and not some new trend M$ invents every second friday.
Well, Perl, the language for which we've all gathered here seems like a mix of everything. It has the imperative stuff from C and family, the functional stuff from Lisp and friends. But is there a "Perlish way" ? Could we look at code of some good programmer (not talking about newbies here) and say - "Yump, he knows the trade, but he definitely came from a different background and just recently learned Perl from a book".
Thus, I ponder... Hope to hear (or see, literally) some examples or thoughts from you.
I hope this topic wasn't beaten in the past too much, but I just got thinking (meditating) about something interesting.
Those of you who dealt with foreign language speakers for some (depends on what is a foreign language for you, of course... for me English is) time surely know what it is like to hear a person talking correctly, but not the "native way". Eg, using phrases, that, while syntactically (sp ?) and semantically correct, don't "sound right". It gets you to think that the person studied the language well, but hadn't really spoken it to native speakers much.
The same, IMHO, applies to programming languages. Languages have a "way" - a style & techniques that "seem right" to gurus. For instance, Lisp has a very specific "way". You can, and many definitely do, write C-ish code in Lisp. Sure, just bang variables all around, setf them, use do and loop instead of map and recursion, pay no attention to closures and macros, etc.
C itself also has "a way", and many others do - notably the old and established languages, and not some new trend M$ invents every second friday.
Well, Perl, the language for which we've all gathered here seems like a mix of everything. It has the imperative stuff from C and family, the functional stuff from Lisp and friends. But is there a "Perlish way" ? Could we look at code of some good programmer (not talking about newbies here) and say - "Yump, he knows the trade, but he definitely came from a different background and just recently learned Perl from a book".
Thus, I ponder... Hope to hear (or see, literally) some examples or thoughts from you.
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