Reading this list, seeing people talk about CPAN, I was tempted to talk about the community of Perl and how gosh darn cool it was. but then I realized that if I was stuck on a desert isle with no connection to the world, no CPAN, no PerlMonks, no web pages, Perl would STILL be a cool language.

I'm not sure I agree with this. Well, depending on what resources you have on your island. Do you have the source? Do you have perldoc? Let's say you don't have the source for Perl, nor perldoc (obviously not a real *nix system running here...). Can you remember all the keywords and constructs? With C, you have 27 or 32 key words. With C++ it's a few more. With average (modern) BASICs, it's like 100+. Java I can't remember.

Now, with C, you could feasibily remember your 27 keywords. And anything you need can be built on those 27 keywords (by the way, Forth is probably the best at this paradigm!).

While you could definitely still write useful software in Perl with the basic knowledge, you couldn't fully exploit it. Now, if you happen to have the ORA CD Bookshelf, then it's a whole different story.

And perhaps this spawns a thread in itself. How often do you refer to the documention? I use certain features of the langauge infrequently, and when I don't use them, I either have to look them up, or hack at it to get it right. I sling LoLs of LoLs about with impunity, but am pretty weak with regexs. I have virtually no experience with autoloaders, but am comfortable with writing packages. I don't do sophisticated OO, but dont' always take the shorted path to getting somewhere. My excuse is I don't use Perl 100% of the time (I do a lot of embedded C and assembly).

What would you (the reader, not just Blue) consider your strengths and weaknesses in Perl? Will you attempt to improve the areas you're weak in, or wait until you need to do something with that feature?

--Chris

e-mail jcwren

In reply to (jcwren) Re: What is it about perl that makes perl so cool? by jcwren
in thread What is it about perl that makes perl so cool? by zigster

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