in reply to Re^4: So, just what exactly is it about Perl?
in thread So, just what exactly is it about Perl?

I don't think you or BUU are missing anything except the perspective of the newly arrived immigrant. Perl has a great doc base but I didn't know about any of it till I'd been coding perl for almost a year. It's nobody's fault, it's that Perl attracts those who don't have a programming background. Many of the hackers here are computer scientists and engineers but a lot of the hackers in perl at large are English majors, designers, linguists, biologists, etc who, being self-taught, may well have never heard of "man" or "perldoc" and don't know where to turn for help besides the top matches on Google for perl like, unfortunately, Matt's Script Archive.

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Re^6: So, just what exactly is it about Perl?
by BUU (Prior) on Nov 10, 2004 at 03:44 UTC
    You say "top matches on google", but when I do a search for "perl" on google just now, my top matches are:
    1. Perl.com
    2. Perl.org
    3. Cpan
    4. Activestate
    5. Perldoc.com
    All of which have links to online documentation. Are these links not good enough? Are they hard to find?
[reply]

      Yeah, you make a good point and I shouldn't have glossed over that. Those sites, for the most part, are irrelevant and opaque to a beginner. (I don't think perldoc.com existed when I started or I would've glommed right onto it but only if I'd know what "perldoc" meant to begin with; I use it today to keep version differences straight b/t work and home.)

      Few of the major docs or sites are aimed at beginners or newcomers to programming; after all, how do you explain pack to a non-programmer? Again, I think this is testament to what a wide and open appeal Perl holds; as well as how approachable it is. I've tried teaching myself some C and Lisp, among other things, from public docs and tutorials and Perl is a cake-walk by comparison. The docs are opaque and slippery for beginners, though, and people who come to Perl from C or Java or whatever don't/can't really see it. I'm not criticizing--the quality of the docs you get for free is immense--just giving the perspective of the BA side of the fence.

[reply]
        I don't care *what* you criticize, as long as you make accurate well informed criticisms. So is your main point that perl.com and perl.org are hard to use for the beginner, or that perl lacks an appropiate "beginner's" tutorial?
[reply]

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