Dave Howorth wrote:
Sergey Mkrtchyan wrote:
Recently I gotta play around with text files too much, hopefully that will
make me to start reading some shell scripting soon!
If you're a biophysicist who expects to make much use of computers, I'd
concentrate on learning Perl or Python rather than [bash] shell. IMHO,
you'll find them more useful when you interact with other tools or do
more complicated tasks and either can do much the same as bash.
The big problem with perl, however, is that it rapidly
turns into "write-only" code.
Although perl has excellant pattern-matching abilities,
most pattern-matching strings are almost completely
indecipherable, even to the programmer once he hasn't
looked at them for a couple weeks.
And 90% of programming is maintaining code written by
you or someone else.
If you can't understand your own code well enough to
maintain it, what's it going to be like for someone
else who is NOT you?
If it weren't for that factor, perl would be great.
But...with 15 different ways to do things, and now
the language is so large that most people use use
a subset of the language... you run into situations
where you can't understand what someone is doing
with their code, not because you're stupid, but
because your method of implementing the algorithm,
and the other guy's method of implementing the same
algorithm look completely different.
Perl is rapidly demonstrated the same sort of "2nd
System Effect" (let's try to do EVERYTHING) that
Multics did -- with the same result -- too much
complexity, and the creation of a byzantine system
which forever has mysterious corners, even to people
who use it all day, every day.
Cheers, Dave
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