There was this guy talking about perl, and how it is a great and easy languige. He is a good programmer, so i thought i would check it out, is there any thing good about Perl???

quote: Original post by helpo
is there any thing good about Perl???

Hell, yeah!

There has to be a reason why Perl is one of the web''s premier scripting languages, despite its admittedly dirty-looking code (Larry Wall, Perl''s creator, said his daughter once looked over his shoulder at Perl 4 code and said "What''s that, swearing?"). There has to be a reason why every new scripting language is hyped as the "Perl-killer" (Python, Eiffel, Ruby...)

Simply put, Perl embodies the philosphy TMTOWTDI - "There''s more than one way to do it". It lets you do what you want to do without worrying about background details that are the same 99% of the time - and you can modify those details in the stubborn 1%. It "makes simple things easy and hard things possible," to quote Randall Schwarz, a major Perl contributor, advocate and author. It''s a crazy and fun language and features syntax so similar to C that I was productive in it within 4 days (I had a job as the maintainer of an archive of Perl scripts).

Also, Perl has one of the largest and most mature development communities supporting it so you''ll find that there are already freely downloadable scripts to do most of the things you need to, which makes Perl an invaluable tool for sysadmins and webmasters. It''s flexible in terms of its applicability - from installation programs to GUI software to CGI.

Of course you may prefer a more "structured" language like Python, or a more object-oriented language like Ruby. Check out CPAN (the place for all things Perl) for documentation, downloads, scripts, extensions, modules, articles and general information on Perl.

I recently began learning Python, and I have to say it''s a very easy to learn language (note: I have not touched Perl yet)

The main Python package is available at www.python.org. ActiveState''s package includes Windows-specific modules and a really nice Python IDE. I recommend getting the ActiveState version unless you are using a platform other than Windows.

As for its ease of use, I added Python scripting to an IRC client I am working on without any major problems.

Python links:

Official Python Site
ActiveState''s Python package
Instant Python Tutorial

Heh, Perl is great for certain things, although I would say that the syntax is not the easiest for a beginner. Perl really comes into its own for sysadmin tasks in UNIX-based systems like sorting, filtering and scanning large text files. I used to be a Perl programmer and used it mainly for converting XML files to HTML, writing web-spiders, using it in CGI programs for web-based database connectivity and throwing text files around the system.

If you''re really interested, there is an OpenGL module for Perl so that you can write simple games with it. However, as Perl is an interpreted language, the performance is terrible and because its a script, your source code is wide open. You can get a Perl compiler from somewhere on the net, but if you''re going that route you may as well use C.

RM.



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