The author of the article made the following statement:
"Perl can be intimidating to developers used to other
languages that don't have as many different ways of doing any given task."
The author gave no facts in the form of developer surveys or quotes from intimidated developers :) to back up that assertion.
I first became acquainted with Perl through reading O'Reilly's book "Google Hacks." My first impression of the language,
coming from a Visual Basic/Pascal background, was that there sure were a lot of curly braces:). As I started digging into Perl, particularly through Wall et al's "Programming Perl", the language made a lot of sense. In short, I did not find Perl intimidating.
When I discovered that Perl automatically handled array/list sizing, my reaction was to shout "Hallelujah!"
In some other languages, obviously, adjusting array sizes takes more work than in Perl. So that feature practically sold me on Perl all by itself.
Did any of you monks out there find Perl intimidating at first, and if so, what attributes of the language were problematic?
A discussion on this might be useful to the folks who are putting a lot of time into promoting this language...
Scott
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