Re: Effect of OS Platform choice for learning and doing Perl well

I might ask - why do you want to learn Perl? Is it something for work? or is it something you just want to learn for yourself?

If the former - then find which platform is supported at work and learn the Perl on that. If the latter - then find the OS you are most comfortable learning on and to which you have easy access and go from there. Personally, I like using Perl for the scripting we have to do because I can write it on either Windows or Unix - test it there and then move it over to the other platform and it will function just fine. If you have to fight the OS while learning Perl - you will have a much harder time (in my opinion).

just my 2¢ :-)

Comment on Re: Effect of OS Platform choice for learning and doing Perl well

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Re^2: Effect of OS Platform choice for learning and doing Perl well by Anonymous Monk on Sep 29, 2005 at 20:38 UTC
Hi Nimdokk, I'm the original poster. In answer to your question, I primarily want to learn Perl for myself. It's doubtful that work will allow any Perl development. Java has been declared the official language for all new development (mostly Servlets and JSP) by Senior Management at work. However, since I don't care for Java -- at least as it's being adopted and deployed at work -- I'll most likely be "walking the plank" to some other way of earning a living. I could get another mainframe job, but I'm thinking it may be a good time to make a career change. I'm in my early 40's and have a couple year's living expenses saved up. Developing web based systems is appealing to me. Perl (using CPAN) deployed on nix seems a great way to go; especially if I end up running my own collection of e-commerce sites on my own nix servers, doing the analytics, SEO and SEM myself. I figure, relatively speaking, that there are pluses enjoyed and minuses suffered as a result of which OS one chooses to develop and deploy upon. But I don't know what those are for FreeBSD, Linux and Solaris 10. I suspect there are different subtleties that crop up now and then with the way a script/language interacts with one OS versus another. But again, I don't know what these are, let alone how frequently they occur -- nor how they might affect server uptime and maintenance requirements. Is there meat here...or just mist and myth? Also, there is the "context" an OS comes with. The richness and power of the user land, utilities and libraries....the quality of documentation...and last but not least even the "cultural personality" many typical working environments of the user base and community surrounding a given OS and development language exhibit. Hopefully, I'll end up working for myself and will care mostly about suitability to task, uptime, performance and ease of keeping the servers up to date and secure. But if I end up getting another job, why not also do what I can now to pick the most kindred spirits to work with by picking the platform and development tools as best I can? I seek to choose wisely and well. Thus my query to those here who, IMO, are wise indeed. Sincerely and gratefully, a humble newbie	[reply]

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Re^2: Effect of OS Platform choice for learning and doing Perl well
by Anonymous Monk on Sep 29, 2005 at 20:38 UTC

I'm the original poster. In answer to your question, I primarily want to learn Perl for myself. It's doubtful that work will allow any Perl development. Java has been declared the official language for all new development (mostly Servlets and JSP) by Senior Management at work.

However, since I don't care for Java -- at least as it's being adopted and deployed at work -- I'll most likely be "walking the plank" to some other way of earning a living. I could get another mainframe job, but I'm thinking it may be a good time to make a career change. I'm in my early 40's and have a couple year's living expenses saved up.

Developing web based systems is appealing to me. Perl (using CPAN) deployed on *nix seems a great way to go; especially if I end up running my own collection of e-commerce sites on my own *nix servers, doing the analytics, SEO and SEM myself.

I figure, relatively speaking, that there are pluses enjoyed and minuses suffered as a result of which OS one chooses to develop and deploy upon. But I don't know what those are for FreeBSD, Linux and Solaris 10.

I suspect there are different subtleties that crop up now and then with the way a script/language interacts with one OS versus another. But again, I don't know what these are, let alone how frequently they occur -- nor how they might affect server uptime and maintenance requirements. Is there meat here...or just mist and myth?

Also, there is the "context" an OS comes with. The richness and power of the user land, utilities and libraries....the quality of documentation...and last but not least even the "cultural personality" many typical working environments of the user base and community surrounding a given OS and development language exhibit.

Hopefully, I'll end up working for myself and will care mostly about suitability to task, uptime, performance and ease of keeping the servers up to date and secure. But if I end up getting another job, why not also do what I can now to pick the most kindred spirits to work with by picking the platform and development tools as best I can?

I seek to choose wisely and well. Thus my query to those here who, IMO, are wise indeed.

Sincerely and gratefully,

a humble newbie

[reply]