in reply to What Are You Doing For Perl?

I reject your premise.

Perl is a tool. So is Python. So is Ruby. So is C. So is a hammer. I don't advocate Perl when a hammer is more useful. The object is to get stuff done, not to win some farcical language war. Perl gets stuff done. I know several people who know Perl reasonably well, but like Ruby or Python better for syntactic reasons--and that's fine, if they can get stuff done. If it hurts their brain to read sigils (and some people feel that way very strongly), I'm not reasonably going to sell them on Perl.

What am I doing for Perl? Getting stuff done with it, and when people ask me how I did it, I'm showing them, and explaining how Perl helped. I'm answering questions when I can, and reading the answers of others when I don't know them. Continuing to learn the language so that I can do more, and help more.

What am I *not* doing? Anonymously posting inflammatory rhetoric. That'd be doing *to*, not doing *for*.

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Re^2: What Are You Doing For Perl?
by FunkyMonk (Bishop) on Aug 07, 2009 at 00:27 UTC
    If it hurts their brain to read sigils (and some people feel that way very strongly)
    Heh. That was me about 10 years ago. At that time, I was doing a lot of text processing in gawk, and, when pushed, it just wasn't up to the task. I'd looked at Perl several times, but was always put off by the sigils. "it's just BASIC on steroids" were my thoughts at the time.

    So, I turned to Java, but (lucky for me) it didn't have the regex support I needed.

    Eventually, I bit the bullet, and started with Perl and it's fugly sigils.

    It was the best decision I've ever made. It didn't take very long before I was asking myself "how the hell did I ever cope with being a C programmer? I've learnt other languages since learning Perl, but it's always Perl I return to.

    Back to the original topic

    I've added MooseX::Declare to the wikipedia page.

[reply]

      Comparing the two additions, I really think the one added by our anonymous whiner should just be removed (it didn't display $_ correctly for me, but mostly is just sucks in comparison to the MooseX::Declare one and it seems silly to have two Perl examples on such a non-Perl-specific page).

      - tye        

[reply]
[d/l]
        I agree, so I was bold and moved the regular Moose example to the discussion page. As I mention on there I think if there are two Perl examples one should only use core modules.

        Elda Taluta; Sarks Sark; Ark Arks
[reply]

      "Eventually, I bit the bullet, and started with Perl and it's fugly sigils. "

      I guess now you think they're Funky!

[reply]
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