On Tue, 23 Jun 2009 11:52:41 -0400 Jeff Soules <sou...@gmail.com> wrote:
... > Quick storytime: Several years back, I was writing some XML format > converters in Perl. There are wonderful pre-written Perl modules to > parse and output XML. But I wanted to "learn more," so I insisted on > doing it all myself. (Management wasn't watching me too closely.) It > took me three times as long to write and the code wasn't flexible or > maintainable... and honestly, I didn't learn anything worthwhile, but > I wanted to "learn." Now, whenever I find myself doing this, I look > back at that: do I *really* want to spend my time inventing inferior > ways to parse XML? Is it so interesting to write string parsers? > What am I learning? How much better it is just to learn the common > tools! If I want to learn, I'm better off reading someone else's > great code than writing my own bad code. It's not the "waste of time > those scripts languages bring to us programmers" -- they exist to SAVE > time. If you doubt it, challenge a perl programmer to a race > sometime. There are problems for which it would be faster to *learn > perl well enough to write a perl solution* than to write the solution > in C. Interesting; here's a different perspective (I'm not a serious enough coder to go on the record with an opinion): http://www.codinghorror.com/blog/archives/001145.html Celejar -- mailmin.sourceforge.net - remote access via secure (OpenPGP) email ssuds.sourceforge.net - A Simple Sudoku Solver and Generator -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to debian-user-requ...@lists.debian.org with a subject of "unsubscribe". Trouble? Contact listmas...@lists.debian.org