>>>>> "Dan" == Dan Sugalski <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> writes:
Dan> People think they *must* know all the core bits of a language, and
Dan> they think that consists of all the stuff we ship with perl. (And,
Dan> let's face it, we ship a *lot* of stuff with perl) It's like you're
Dan> not allowed to know only a part of a language anymore--that's somehow
Dan> ungeeky or something.
One of the things that I think made llama1 so successful and our
ongoing llama course popular is that I deliberately chose a subset of
Perl to teach that was reasonably self-consistent and yet covered 80%
of people wanted to do with Perl in under 100 lines of code.
And that's not an easy task. I thought long and hard about where to
put array slices and alternate quoting operators. I had to think
about how much new problem space a given feature opens for the number
of paragraphs it would take to describe the feature.
That's why you don't see heredocs in llama1. It's easy to describe
for those familiar with the Unix shell, but if you're talking about a
standalone tutorial, it takes a good page or two to really talk about
the nuances. And the same problem space was covered fine by just
letting a double-quoted string break over many lines. :)
And that's why you still won't see heredocs in llama3. The point of
the llama is to cover a subset that lets you implement most of what
you need for most of the programs out there.
In fact, Tom Phoenix and I killed "formats". Yeah, people use them,
but the 10 pages for that were sorely needed to cover other things in
more detail or more breadth.
So, when Perl6 stabilizes a bit more, I'll be starting the same
process for Perl6.... what's the "tiny language" buried within this
large language? I bet I can still give you the "first 40 hours that
everyone needs starting with Perl6" in a 250-page book, and it'll
still cover 80% of what everyone needs for 80% of the programs. I bet
about 75% will be the same semantics as llama3, with some syntax
changes.
--
Randal L. Schwartz - Stonehenge Consulting Services, Inc. - +1 503 777 0095
<[EMAIL PROTECTED]> <URL:http://www.stonehenge.com/merlyn/>
Perl/Unix/security consulting, Technical writing, Comedy, etc. etc.
See PerlTraining.Stonehenge.com for onsite and open-enrollment Perl training!
