in reply to Should I give up Perl?

This might sound arrogant, but do you think better than 95% of all PHP programmers is difficult?

A friend of mine once said, from his many years of experience of his colleagues in a mixed environment : "There are no PHP programmers only PHP users".

While this is for sure exaggerated, do you think in a PHP environment many would cherish your top 5% skills?

And could it be that your Perl experience helped you reaching this 5%?

To avoid misunderstandings, I'm not talking about language design, but surrounding culture.

The situation is similar in JS, while I like the language, many self proclaimed experts are only web-designers cutting and pasting code.

This is all based on my personal experience so far and might change in the future.

No flame intended!

Cheers Rolf

( addicted to the Perl Programming Language)

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Re^2: Should I give up Perl?
by space_monk (Chaplain) on Jun 01, 2013 at 15:39 UTC
    Well I think PHP5 is a genuine OO language with features such as private and protected data, so used properly it is a reasonable programming language. Both Perl and PHP can be written well or poorly.

    Rather than Perl being a direct help, I think a CompSci/Maths degree and 20 years+ experience helps. Doing a lot of C and assembly language encourages economy of code. :-)

    If you spot any bugs in my solutions, it's because I've deliberately left them in as an exercise for the reader! :-)
[reply]

      PHP has some nice OO features that I'd like to see in Perl, but also lacks some found in Perl - no multiple inheritance; traits are a very recent development and somewhat lacking compared to Moose's roles; overloading support is minimal (there's __toString, and the Iterable interface, but that's about it). I've personally always thought the introspection APIs, though quite comprehensive, are kinda clunky.

      PHP's OO is a very nicely designed part of PHP; arguably the only nicely designed part of PHP. ;-) If somebody were to take the basic syntax of PHP (minus <?php), and its OO system, but strip out all those gazillion globally namespaced functions, replacing them with a well-designed standard library of classes, that would be bloody lovely.

      package Cow { use Moo; has name => (is => 'lazy', default => sub { 'Mooington' }) } say Cow->new->name
[reply]
[d/l]
      OK you convinced me, give up Perl! =)

      Cheers Rolf

      ( addicted to the Perl Programming Language)

[reply]

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