To me, beauty comes when I can accomplish something relatively easily. Of course, as do almost all of my work in Perl these days, I don't have those periods of struggling with something in {insert language name here}, and then switch back to Perl, and find that I can significantly reduce my number of lines of code (without significantly obfuscating it -- I'd rather have it be maintainable than be short ... of course, fewer number of steps tends to be more maintainable).

You start to take for granted many of the more simple things. You tend to be impressed by the simple things that you just couldn't do (or couldn't do easily, or without extra steps), in whatever languages you learned before you got to Perl.

For instance, someone who's only dealt with Perl, and other languages from its generation wouldn't fully appreciate:

($a, $b) = ($b, $a);

or

foreach my $item ( @array ) { ... }

or garbage collection. Or not needing to malloc all of your arrays. Or dealing with strings, without needing to worry about buffer overflows. Or strings longer than 255 characters.

(Yes, I know, there are other languages that do this, but Perl was the first one I came across, and used it enough to be comfortable in.)

PS. HTML is not "programming", with or without the quotes.

In reply to Re: Beautiful Perl by jhourcle
in thread Beautiful Perl by BrentDax

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