... or will I just be more confused because I'm trying to relate everything I'm learning to how it is done in Perl, but in reality it is totally different?

That rather depends on your mindset.

What might cause a problem is that with Perl, you get used to solving several classes of problems quickly. Particularly text processing problems, or problems involving networked clients or servers. When you start getting into a second lanaguage, you're going to hit a frustration barrier when you realize just how much stuff you have to build yourself, by hand, to get to the point of attacking a problem that would take a few dozen lines of Perl.

This frustration can generate a secondary problem: If the other folks in your class see you as the guy/gal who is always complaining about how much better the world would be if everyone would just use Perl, it's going to put some of them off. Whining is not effective advocacy. Try to limit yourself to one "I could have done this in 10 lines of Perl" remark per week.

That aside, one issue you'll run into by moving from Perl (or Java) to C is garbage collection. In Perl and Java, it's mostly automagic. Drop the last reference to something, and it magically goes away. In C, and to some extent in C++, you have to manage dynamically allocated memory yourself. In some systems, a lot of effort goes into bookkeeping on memory. You might not run into this in CS unless you take a course in Software Engineering that tackles a large project.

In reply to (dws)Re: Does Knowing Perl Help or Hinder Learning another Language by dws
in thread Does Knowing Perl Help or Hinder Learning another Language by dru145

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