Honestly, I can't say that I dislike Windows - it's my desktop operating system of choice, and I have still to meet somebody who can convince me of a better desktop OS (although MacOS X might be a strong contender, if they would get rid of that One-Button-Mouse and the proprietary hardware).

On the other side, I find it quite natural that this site attracts people as regulars who like to use Perl and find it more suited to their tasks than other languages, and there are not many languages better suited to data-wrangling than Perl. There are also many people here who are fluent in several languages, of the programming and of the natural kind, so I think that there is some perspective many people have here.

tillys excellent post and link have made me think a lot about my genesis as a programmer and how the power of the languages I used progressed. I started with BASIC, moved to Pascal, x86 assembly language, Delphi and now Perl and Python (some non-serious sidetracks of DBase, SQL and Java omitted). BASIC was the first programming language available to me.(Turbo) Pascal, being a compiled language, was cool at its time to teach me the basic concepts of code structure, modular design, data structure and scope. x86 assembly language gave me full access to everything. Delphi finally had (enforced) class interfaces. Perl and Python have eval statements that allow me to write code that produces code that gets run, plus all of the other features except being compiled (Python can be compiled). The next two things on my list are SmallTalk (thanks to merlyn), which seems to stretch farther in the object-oriented section in a sense like Python does already, and what I read from the Second Apocalypse, Perl 6 will also, and LISP, which has a concept called "macros", which seem to be eval statements with syntax checks and full access to the parse tree (which would make self-modifying code much more efficient/easy than raw text manipulation in Perl).

With that evolution in mind, C is far behind me, just like Pascal. I would miss the features Perl delivers to me, C has no eval statement and much of the easy stuff is hard to do in C (think of copying strings, iterating over arrays and hashes). C to me always combined the advantages of assembly language with the disadvantages of assembly language. So I shun people using C for stuff where I consider Perl better suited for.

PS: tilly tells me that macros are even cooler stuff - they allow you to really modify the parse tree of the whole program, as it seems while it is parsed, so you can implement stuff like Damians Switch module on-the-fly, in the language. And if you're running on a LISP machine, you get native speed as well for your extension.

In reply to Re: Perlmonk Oedipus Complex? by Corion
in thread Perlmonk Oedipus Complex? by Sherlock

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