(Ovid) Re: Perl advocacy

[Ovid]

A couple of thoughts:

• Drop the regex. It's practically unreadable and if any has heard of the FUD regarding Perl and linenoise, that will only encourage it.
• Go ahead and include the Amazon and eToys links. The odds are, many people who read your document will not follow your links.
• You mention that a company is thinking about adopting Perl as a development language. What sort of development? What are they trying to accomplish and how does Perl help them accomplish this? If they want device drivers or high-speed number crunching, Perl is not the best solution.

Incidentally, if you must include the regex, at least have pretty formatting so it looks nice:

$/ = ''; # paragrep mode
while (<>) {
    while ( m{
               \b      # start at a word boundary (begin letters)
                (      # capture to $1
                  \S+  #   one or more non-spaces
                )      # find chunk of non-whitespace
                \b     # until another word boundary (end letters)
                (      # capture to $2
                  \s+  #   separated by some whitespace
                  \1   #   whatever was in $1
                  \b   #   until another word boundary
                )+     # one or more sets of those
             }xig ) {
        print "dup word '$1' at paragraph $.\n";
    }
}

Just looking at that code, even when nicely formatted, makes me wince when I think about trying to convert anyone with it. Sure, we know what <>, $/, $., $1, and \1 mean, not to mention the /x, /i and /g modifiers on the regex, but those are going to scare the heck out of someone and make 'em long for Python or something.

If you show them some code, I think some 'baby Perl' would be a nice way to start.

Cheers,
Ovid

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