Hey All!

Being a relative newcomer to the collected seekers of wisdom browsing this excellent site I ponder on exactly what is it that makes Perl have such a vibrant community and faithful following?

I see the same names lurking (is that the right word? ;-) around this site, offering suggestion, advice and other words of encouragement. It's really great!! I suppose this can only stem from the intrinsic qualities of the language itself. As I become more and more familiar with the subtleties and awsome flexibility of this great language - and more keenly aware every day of how much more there is to learn - I wonder if my feelings are shared by the rest of you...
From simple one-liners via the unbridled joy that is CPAN to Mr. Conways voyages into the wonderful world of OO there seems to be something for everyone.

I imagine there were a couple of prevalent points of entry for those of us here:

1. ksh / sh / bash just don't cut it anymore.

• We're fed up of having to write to temp files (/tmp/$0.$$ anyone?) to be able to reference the results from within for loops later in our scripts.

• Even when trying to compensate with bash builtins ( such as $(< $file) instead of catand so on.) the performance is just not good enough.
  And sometimes... it matters.

• Three (and a bit) words: no multi-dimensional arrays

• "Data-structures? We don't need no steenkin' data-structures!" - Ummmm... Actually? We do.

2. Needed a prototyping lanuage? Blown away by the rapid development speed?

• You'll have to help me here... This is not where I'm from...

Is there "a third way"?

And finally:

For the third morning in a row I woke up today after having a particularly strange Perl related dream (this one was about typeglobs).... this thing is getting to me!!

Should I seek professional help?

Cheers

SM

....still putting the Monk into Monkey....

PS. As some of you read this, sagely shaking your head and smiling to yourself at the burblings of a Perl adolescent, let me reassure you that I realised that I could be following the ever so typical profile of a newish Perl user ... "they alway post something like this at around Level 4".

Ah well. I'll post it anyway. ;-)

---

---

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! —

• How do I compose an effective node title?
• How do I post a question effectively?
• Markup in the Monastery

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:
	&		&
	<		&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.