One professor of mine ... proceeded to explain to me that the point of a "high-level" language is to insulate the programmer from dealing with "low-level" ideas such as hard drives

I totally agree with your professor here. Perl should have shielded it from us i.m.h.o..
I always felt that in perl, everything is a scalar, except a file(handle). Now if i am going to suggest here that a file should be a scalar too, some of you might tell me that that's unwise for performance reasons, but that's exactly what Perl should do for me, shield it and make it fast enough.

It's a bit like the primitive types discussion in Java. They should be objects.

In reply to Re: Paul Graham on Great Hackers by Jaap
in thread Paul Graham on Great Hackers by biosysadmin

Title:
Use:  <p> text here (a paragraph) </p>
and:  <code> code here </code>
to format your post, it's "PerlMonks-approved HTML":


  • Posts are HTML formatted. Put <p> </p> tags around your paragraphs. Put <code> </code> tags around your code and data!
  • Titles consisting of a single word are discouraged, and in most cases are disallowed outright.
  • Read Where should I post X? if you're not absolutely sure you're posting in the right place.
  • Please read these before you post! —
  • Posts may use any of the Perl Monks Approved HTML tags:
    a, abbr, b, big, blockquote, br, caption, center, col, colgroup, dd, del, details, div, dl, dt, em, font, h1, h2, h3, h4, h5, h6, hr, i, ins, li, ol, p, pre, readmore, small, span, spoiler, strike, strong, sub, summary, sup, table, tbody, td, tfoot, th, thead, tr, tt, u, ul, wbr
  • You may need to use entities for some characters, as follows. (Exception: Within code tags, you can put the characters literally.)
            For:     Use:
    & &amp;
    < &lt;
    > &gt;
    [ &#91;
    ] &#93;
  • Link using PerlMonks shortcuts! What shortcuts can I use for linking?
  • See Writeup Formatting Tips and other pages linked from there for more info.