UPDATE: you may want to have a look into perlboot if you don't know the difference... perl isn't a language one can master with try and error hacking ...
I stumbled across this only six months later, and I can't help wondering: What language is there better suited to trial-and-error manipulations? Certainly, after consulting the camel books for various basics, I learned a huge amount of what I know by experimenting and finding interesting and unexpected failures.
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Well, you will learn a "a huge amount ... by experimenting" in all languages!
But IMHO all these interwoven huffmancoded syntaxfeatures of Perl can only be masterd by reading the fucking manuals.
> What language is there better suited to trial-and-error manipulations?
From what I know ... Javascript! (with some exceptions)
I don't really master Python, from what I've seen it's very orthogonal.
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What language is there better suited to trial-and-error manipulations?
From what I know ... Javascript! (with some exceptions)
To continue our slow-motion conversation ….
I disagree, but I think that it's a real matter of background. I spent a lot of time with the llama book, but sadly without a working Perl installation, before I started experimenting in Perl, and I think that it really paid off—suddenly off-hand comments in the text made a lot more sense, and I felt it got me in really good shape for the camel book.
On the other hand, when I wanted to do something in Javascript, since I couldn't find any good equivalent of the llama book, I went out and found a web page that did something like what I wanted, then tried to adapt it. After a lot of manipulation, over the course of a week or so, it still only sorta-kinda worked; and I didn't understand why the bits that worked worked, or why the bits that didn't didn't, or why the original code was how it was in the first place. I think that what this says is that it's good to experiment in any language (or, to be precise, at least these two languages :-) ) after (or while) reading some introductory documentation; and bad to experiment in any language before doing so.
I think this quote probably cuts right to the heart of our disagreement:
But IMHO all these interwoven huffmancoded syntaxfeatures of Perl can only be masterd by reading the fucking manuals.
I agree that mastering Perl requires manuals (preferably not Mastering Perl itself …) and/or a healthy relationship with perldoc; but I think that one of the great things about Perl is that you can, and should, do something, well before you can do everything. (At least, when I see new intricacies of Perl, I think: “Cool, now I know a new trick that refines my understanding”; whereas, when I see new intricacies of Haskell, I think: “Well, it turns out that I didn't even know what little I thought I knew …”.)
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