in reply to Re: Re: Re: Perl Popularity
in thread Perl Popularity

Not sure about the Camel - I'm not sure there is a whole load of "don't cross the streams" stuff, although perhaps they do introduce some advanced stuff a little early. But, for example, if you didn't introduce arrays (I don't think PHP has them? Only hashes?) you save a whole load of oddness like $#array. Comparing the languages like-for-like, I think Perl is as easy if not easier in many respects. Maybe there ought to be a 'Really Simple Perl' Guide...

I agree with the benefits of PHP, though. I hate the language, but my rant about it was that there is a real hole it's filling that Perl cannot touch currently, and I don't think it's anything to do with right tool for right job-ism. Your example of CGI is right on the money.

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Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Perl Popularity
by hardburn (Abbot) on Dec 17, 2003 at 18:43 UTC

    Not sure about the Camel - I'm not sure there is a whole load of "don't cross the streams" stuff, although perhaps they do introduce some advanced stuff a little early.

    I mean stuff like the autoincrement operator's magic on strings. If you're a new programmer, you can get along just fine without knowing that. Yet there it is, stuck right in chapter 3.

    This is just to say that the Camel (and much of Perl's distribution docs) cover advanced stuff too early to be useful as a newbie guide. There are books that are good for that, though (like "Learning Perl").

    if you didn't introduce arrays (I don't think PHP has them?

    Hashes are just weird arrays with slow lookup times that allow you to dereference them with a string instead of a number. Of course, I'm hand-waving over a lot of implementation details here.

    ----
    I wanted to explore how Perl's closures can be manipulated, and ended up creating an object system by accident.
    -- Schemer

    : () { :|:& };:

    Note: All code is untested, unless otherwise stated

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Re: Perl Popularity
by Abigail-II (Bishop) on Dec 18, 2003 at 17:11 UTC
    I don't think that Perl is easy compared to many other languages, and I certainly don't think Perl is easy to learn.

    But I don't think it's relevant when judging the usefulness of a language. It's easier to learn to ride a bike that it is to learn to drive a car. That doesn't mean people ditch their cars and replace them by bikes. Just because something is easier to learn, or it's not as rich as Perl doesn't mean it is as useful. (But that doesn't mean that something that is more useful is harder to learn).

    Abigail

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