On Mon, 19 Aug 2002 09:00:21 -0600 Lance Levsen <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
> > the bigest problem with perl based solutions is ...perl. Perl is > > great provided a) you already know it well, b) you never need to fix > > it. Anyone new to scripting languages should probably not start on > > perl if they can help it. At first it will confuse and frustrate > > you, and eventualy render you indispensable as the only person in > > the company with half a chance of decrypting all the perl code > > you've written. > > > > Not wanting to start a language war... all popular languages are > > good and vise-versa... for their particular task. Everyone should > > learn them all. I'm not convinced anything big is perls particular > > task... but quick and dirty stuff...yeah. I also don't want this to become a language war. Having programmed many languages for over 35 years I pretty well agree with the above. > Personally I like perl. It's way more robust then anything > outside of the compiled languages. See reference to Python below. > It's worth knowing because > the applications for it are much more vast then PHP. That's hard to argue with but many of those working app's can be called from code written in other languages. > I can't speak about python, I know perl why would I need it? Eric Raymond answered that question for me: http://www.linuxjournal.com/article.php?sid=3882 > > As Craig said, and I endorse, > > "why bother learning a language ( .... ) suitable for web > applications when for about the same effort you can learn a > general purpose language that can be used for web applications, > systems administration, any kind of data mangling, and other > general scripting tasks?" Because it is so complicated compared to other languages. I can read many other languages almost immediately but not so for Perl. I have even read most of Programming Perl (that may not be the best place to start but I got it free for reviewing it). Have fun and keep the comments objective, Paul Scott
