in reply to Roads to Perl

I started out writing in MSX basic on a friend's sony hit-bit home-computer (remember when they called 'em that?) when I was 10 years old. Anyway, a few years later I bought a commodore 64, and programmed a lot of basic on that thing too, and I learned a bit of assembly.

A while later I sold my C64 to be able to afford an amiga 500. Wrote a lot of assembly on that thing - great machine: real multi-tasking (but no memory protection) and dedicated cpu's for graphics and sound. It's still sitting in my living room - but I don't use it much anymore. It's probably the last machine I did any serious gaming on - somewhere I decided that programming was just more fun :-)

Then (1993) I went to university where I studied Artificial Intelligence - so I learned a few new programming languages; pascal (hated it), prolog (wonderful, but too specific to be useful as an all-round language) and C (which I though was OK, but not that much better than assembly; I've come to appreciate it more and more over time). This was also the time I first ran into UNIX and the internet, (and vi and emacs (-: ). The WWW was just starting around then. I also bought a windows PC and coded some C++ stuff (mostly soft-synths - i.e. software sound synthesizers).

The last few years at uni, I started working at an web-development company (from the beginning of the commercial WWW to boom to bust) where I learned a lot of new stuff - HTML/CSS/assorted web-development, perl, PHP, a little VB, unix shell scripting, MSDOS batch stuff, Java, company politics and a little more C. Somewhere in 1999 I switched from windows to linux as my main OS for professional development. It took some time to get used to but boy was it worth it.

Now, I am a freelance programmer/consultant. I run almost exclusively linux now (except for testing stuff on Internet Explorer and a few audio programs). Most of my professional work is in java, which can be a terribly frustrating language - though I certainly learned a lot from getting to grips with it. When the language isn't fixed for some reason (i.e. 50% of the project isn't already done) I still prefer perl most of the time, but I am also taking a serious look at ruby - it feels like a "new, clean perl" - unlike python, for example - I can't even read python, I wish I knew why.

"What should it profit a man, if he should win a flame war, yet lose his cool?"

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Re: Roads to Perl
by jonadab (Parson) on Aug 30, 2005 at 13:29 UTC
    I can't even read python, I wish I knew why.

    The conclusion I came to when I dabbled in Python was that it was important to think like Guido. Which, it seems, I don't. Fortunately, it is not necessary to think like Larry to understand Perl -- which is a good thing, because I don't think many of us could manage.

    If I tried Python again now, I might do better. At the time, my primary experience with OO was through Inform (which sets a very high standard for how useful the paradigm should be in the language). OO is pervasive in Python, and I was not accustomed at the time to thinking that way about every problem, or most problems. Now, having done OO in Perl5 (which does *not* meet Inform's standard of how good the OO in a language should be), I've learned to deal with OO stuff in a language other than Inform, and so if I tried Python again, I might do better.

    But, now I am so deeply comfortable in Perl, that Python would have to offer something really compelling to lure me away, and with Perl6 on the horizon, I doubt that's possible. In other words, I could probably learn Python now, but I no longer want to.

[reply]
      The conclusion I came to when I dabbled in Python was that it was important to think like Guido. Which, it seems, I don't. Fortunately, it is not necessary to think like Larry to understand Perl -- which is a good thing, because I don't think many of us could manage.
      Very nice way to concisely express the difference between Python and Perl: indeed it does make sense, for in the former "there should be only one way to do it", then it's (practically) obvious that it must be Guido's way, whereas in Perl we all now that TIMTOWTDI by design.

      Also, Perl is eclectic and multiparadigmatic by design too. And while we're at it, Perl6 will be even more so (even too much, some people fear!).

[reply]

In Section Meditations