Re: perl primary, and keeping multiple languages in your head, and ruby

I have had the experience you fear, but the other way round.

Way back when, my primary languages were C and TCL - I had been working on a large TCL project for about 18 months when it was abruptly canned, coincidentally shortly after I'd started delving into Perl a bit in my spare time.

During the next 12 months I hardly touched TCL, and wrote mostly C and Perl. Then I needed to automate a remote process, and wanted to use Expect for it. Everything went fine until I needed a regular expression - not a problem, I'd been churning the things out with ease just 12 months earlier, except now I found that I couldn't work out how to escape it. Not even with the manual in front of me. My brain simply didn't want to take it.

I spent about a day fighting the dang thing, then decided life was too short, gave up, and did it another way. I've tried to use Expect a couple of times in the 8 years since, with much the same results.

I still believe TCL is a fine language, and maybe when Perl5/6 and Parrot are a reality I'll be able to play with it once more, knowing that I have the freedom to skip out to Perl when I need a regexp.

Hugo

Comment on Re: perl primary, and keeping multiple languages in your head, and ruby

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Re^2: perl primary, and keeping multiple languages in your head, and ruby by Courage (Parson) on Sep 15, 2005 at 14:32 UTC
I had similar feeling when tried regular expressions in Tcl, and it is a reason why I am not fluent in Tcl. "regexp" in Tcl is not a strong part: difficult to use and not as fast as Perl's one. I can't explain strength of Tcl even to myself, but it certainly possesses some wisdom that lacks in Perl: GUI made extremely easy to use there; it is somehow possible in Tcl and impossible in Perl. In Perl, complexity grows when module grows, whereas Tcl manages things to remain simple to use, somehow, even when behaviour is no more simple. How Tcl does that - I can't understand. That is why I use Tcl::Tk whenever I use GUI, and I quite often go to pure Tcl when create GUI	[reply]

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Re^2: perl primary, and keeping multiple languages in your head, and ruby
by Courage (Parson) on Sep 15, 2005 at 14:32 UTC

I can't explain strength of Tcl even to myself, but it certainly possesses some wisdom that lacks in Perl: GUI made extremely easy to use there; it is somehow possible in Tcl and impossible in Perl.
In Perl, complexity grows when module grows, whereas Tcl manages things to remain simple to use, somehow, even when behaviour is no more simple. How Tcl does that - I can't understand.

That is why I use Tcl::Tk whenever I use GUI, and I quite often go to pure Tcl when create GUI

[reply]