C is a much simpler language than Perl and much easier to learn.

Surely you must be joking.

I can teach a programming novice how to write a short program which performs IO in an hour, and he or she has a better than decent chance of remembering how things work with a notecard or two of notes.

I can probably walk the same novice through compiling and running "Hello, world!" in that time and he or she might remember how things work.

It seems to me the reason there is a much stronger ethos of unit testing in the Perl community than in the C community is that the balance between run time and compile time errors is quite different between the languages.

No, it's because it's immensely easier to write tests in Perl than in C.

My guess is that per line of code typical Perl tends to pack in more bugs than typical C, just because Perl can do a heck of a lot more work in one line than C can.

I've heard the opposite, because Perl requires far fewer lines of code than the corresponding C. The bug defect rate tends to be constant per SLOC.

In reply to Re^3: compiling perl scripts aka why is perl not as fast as C by chromatic
in thread compiling perl scripts aka why is perl not as fast as C by punkish

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