Re: Paul Graham on Great Hackers

[jdporter]

He thinks while (<FILE>) is low level? Then I guess you didn't show him sysread. Or XS. :-)

My guess is that this guy is a functional purist, and therefore thinks a HLL shouldn't permit (or, at least, rely on) side effects. You should show him how Perl supports functional programming as well, including such nifty things as closures.

Truly one of the greatest things about Perl is that it is a HLL, a LLL, and everything in between. It's one-stop shopping. You can do everything you need to do, without having to cobble together pieces written in different languages. ("Yeah, I use DHTML for the UI, PL/SQL for the database stuff, and Prolog for the business logic. And I drop down to C for the fiddly bits.")

[hardburn]

When functional language purists talk about how a language can completely lack of side effects, they tend to shrink back when you ask them about I/O. Yes, there are ways of dealing with it (monads, which are beyond my current understanding, and so will only mention them for completeness), but there is no getting around the fact that I/O is a side effect.

Update: One grammour mistake fixed. 1.56 * 10⁷ more to go.

[CountZero]

And if you want to cobble together pieces written in different languages, Perl is the no. 1 glue language!

[jdalbec]

You should show him how Perl supports functional programming as well, including such nifty things as closures.

This might be a good place to start: http://okmij.org/ftp/Scheme/Scheme-in-Perl.txt (shamelessly lifted from Functional Perl as Scheme and functional XML parsing).