in reply to Why learn another language?

So...why would I need to learn another language other than for the journey along a new path..?

From a short term practical point of view, I have found that learning JavaScript has been extremely useful seeing as most if my work runs on a server and is viewed by a web browser client.

The two languags are reasonably complementary and not too different and it can be quite nice to get the client to run the display cruft while the server gets on with someone else. JS can also alow you to do much of the input validation on the client thus saving considerable effort in making the server reject malformed queries politely.

The other, longer term, reason for leaning a new language is that it helps you to think of things in new ways. TMTOWTDI is a big strength of perl, but many perl programmers who have learned perl after experience with other languages come with built-in assumptions because they map perl to $previous_language. I suspect that in a similar fashion your perl will get better if you learn some other languages in addition to perl.

Dingus

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Re^2: Why learn another language?
by Aristotle (Chancellor) on Nov 16, 2002 at 01:36 UTC
    it can be quite nice to get the client to run the display cruft while the server gets on with someone else.
    Is it a closed environment where you have control over the clients? If not, I won't be able to view your site and a lot of other people won't either. Cause I don't usually enable JS - or am sometimes powered by lynx/links.
    JS can also alow you to do much of the input validation on the client thus saving considerable effort in making the server reject malformed queries politely.

    Yikes! What stops anyone from using a saved and edited HTML page or LWP or one of the million other possibilities to maliciously send you malformed input?

    Don't Trust The Client.

    Whatever you do, Don't Trust The Client.

    Makeshifts last the longest.

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      (This is a few days after this thread/post, but i felt it required a reply).

      No where in dingus' post did he say that he blindly trusts the client. What he said was that using javascript to validate the form on the client side is much more efficient then using the equivalent Perl. Having a little box that pops up and says 'your password must be 3 letters long', is much more useful when you don't have to make a round trip to the server to see it. This is definately an issue with very long types of forms, where the prospect of possibly reentering all the data, merely because you forgot to put a space in your address or something equally petty, is a bad one. Not to mention it can save you, the developer, quite a lot of effort when you don't have to worry about returning a customized error doc for every single type of mistake the user could possibly make. If you perform the majority of the validation on the client side, then you can simply display an 'invalid data' error doc to the client, and not have to worry about every case.
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