in reply to Reactions to OO-Perl

I almost never use OO-Perl, and here's why, if it helps.

I am a casual programer, meaning the program gets thrown out after its run, so nobody ever sees it, just its output. I write pseudo-code thats a mix of basic, fortran, c, with some lisp/apl stuff in there if theres recursion/multi-d-arrays. I like perl because it can usually run the pseudo-code with less changing the syntax than the other languages I have around.

I learned programing 15 years ago before OO became the fad with professors, and always suspected its main advantage was to make grading easier. People that learned programming under OO like it, analogous to people who learned to drive an automatic.

Manual cars are hard to come by nowdays, and so will be modules that work right without OO, so I guess we'll all get assimilated eventually. There is no escape.

drinkd

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Re: Re: Reactions to OO-Perl
by jlongino (Parson) on Oct 19, 2001 at 21:59 UTC
    My experience is similar to drinkds. I progressed through Basic, PL/I, Assembler, Pascal, Fortran, SAS, SPSS and Perl. I went directly from University student to Staff and only a few years later did they actually start teaching C++.

    Making the leap from linear to OO programming is not intuitive nor easy for everyone and the longer you've done the former, the more difficult it is to come up to snuff (as in attaining the same degree of speed/expertise/comfort) with the latter. Learning to write an OO "Hello World" script or similar useless programs doesn't prepare one to convert existing programs or start new ones that make extensive use structures like $employee{ssn}{$PO}{email}.

    When I begin the switch (and there is no doubt that I eventually will) it will be done on my own time. I don't have the luxury of doing it on company time since I've got at least a dozen projects already going or on my TODO list and only one or two are with Perl.

    My employers don't care if it is OO or not as long as it works. My boss is a bit older than I and although he doesn't do much with Perl, he is an excellent programmer, problem solver and can follow and modify any of the Perl code that I write. He has a similar background to mine and there would be a learning curve for him as well if I switched.

    Real world constraints often take precedence over idealized ones. -- jlongino

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