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Re: Idea Generation for New Programmer

by ailie (Friar)
on Mar 11, 2001 at 06:32 UTC ( [id://63568]=note: print w/replies, xml ) Need Help??


in reply to Idea Generation for New Programmer

Like you, I am fairly new to Perl. I find that the exercises that have been most useful for me sprang from other interests in my life. My hobby of quilting has led to several quilt-related perl scripts, which have required me to seek out new perl knowledge. I'm not sure how many other people will use my scripts, but I enjoy creating and learning from them.

So my advice is to let ideas for perl projects come to you away from the computer - and then you can assimilate your hobbies into perl!

Replies are listed 'Best First'.
Re: Re: Idea Generation for New Programmer
by Lexicon (Chaplain) on Mar 12, 2001 at 05:51 UTC
    Indeed, I'm also all about the hobbies over anything practical (I'm not reliable enough to be doing anything widely important yet). I just discovered that Perl was great for creating mathmatical algorithms. One could be smart about it and create formulas and derive your algorithms, but that would be too easy. I personally like to stare at numbers and look for patterns. And Perl, for all it's Perlish reasons, puts me that much closer to the numbers. Once you have your algorithm perfected and running in less than O(n!) (heh, that was unpleasant) time, then you can move it over to C or (good heavens) assembly to suck up that last couple multiples of CPU time for good measure.

    My current project (went into v2.0 this weekend bothering to release my O(n!) v1.0 ;) has so far taught me Benchmark, hash generation, that calling subroutines is to be avoided if at all possible, diagnostics, good formatting of diagnostic output, more about references, and various new built in functions. Anyway, I know I promised the algorithm this week, but I reduced the time to O(n^2) or something, am working on O(n) and might even manage O(1) if the Discrete Math Goddess will smile upon me.

    -Lexicon

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