in reply to Learning

I think you are right on track on the motivation issue. The most important thing for me is having an interesting problem to solve.

I have mixed feelings about the usefulness of knowing a "similar" language. Understanding the basics of another programming language will acellerate your education in perl, but you will also bring some bagage from that other language with you. For example, how would you find an instance of a character pattern within a string in BASIC? Or C? or Pascal? Now are any of these approaches the best way to do it in perl? Of course the beauty of perl is that you can take almost any approach you want to solve a given problem. TIMTOWTDI! Rather than knowing a simliar language to perl you may be better off knowing many languages that are not like perl.

---- Coyote (aka: Rich Anderson)

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Re: Re: Learning
by salvadors (Pilgrim) on Jan 07, 2001 at 18:46 UTC

    Rather than knowing a simliar language to perl you may be better off knowing many languages that are not like perl.

    There are languages that *aren't* like Perl!?

    Tony

[reply]
      Well, ultimately, any language that can implement a Turing machine could be said to be "like" Perl.

      But it's pretty easy to define some higher level categories of languages and Perl won't fall into all of the categories. For example, Perl very quickly decategorizes away from Prolog. And depending on how you slice it, I suppose Perl isn't all that much like Smalltalk, or Lisp, or Icon.

      That's not to say you can't borrow knowledge of problem-solving from these languages. That's more to say that you can't as easily just take a program written in one of those languages and implement it in the same number of lines of Perl with a high correlation between the lines, as you can say with C or Pascal.

      It's too early in the morning for me to recall the "big 4" breakdown... I'm sure tilly will chime in. Something like "functional", "declarative", "procedural", blah blah. (Ahh yes, a Super Search yields Why I like functional programming, go see.)

      -- Randal L. Schwartz, Perl hacker

[reply]
        Object paradigm, right? That's the one you're missing from the big 4.... (i think... is too early for me as well...)
[reply]

In Section Meditations