Re: Learning perl - for experienced programmers
- From: "Matt Garrish" <mgarrish@xxxxxxxxx>
- Date: 16 Sep 2006 09:30:17 -0700
cartercc@xxxxxxxxx wrote:
Matt Garrish wrote:
Might be a little too easy for an experienced programmer. It sounds
like he'd be better off jumping straight into the documentation, or
going for the Camel or Cookbook.
(1) The books are cheap. My local bookstore has a pile of the Llama
books (3ed) for under $10.00 (US). (2) They are a pretty easy
introduction for someone who already knows the questions, and is just
looking for the answers.
But as per the request of "dense and pithy", those two don't spring to
mind. They're more the "ease your way into programming and perl" type
books that, for an experienced programmer, can be tiresome to read
(perhaps not so much the second, but certainly the llama). He seemed
pretty explicit in his question that he's not looking for the gentle
ease-you-way-in approach to perl.
Different people have different learning
styles. I keep a copy of the Camel book by my side when writing code,
and a copy of the other two on my bed side table for light reading
before going to sleep.
You and I have very different ideas of what constitutes a good light
read before bed, then... : )
Basic design practices are basic design practices. If you'd like some
examples of hideous and unmaintainable Java code there's plenty I'm
sifting through at my current job. A language is only as bad as the
person writing it.
True, but something about Java lends itself to good engineering, and
something about Perl lends itself to bad engineering. Plus, with Java,
you can easily run javadoc and get something in a standard format.
There's probably something like that for Perl, but it's not a part of
the core language.
You'll have to provide some explicit demonstrations of how Java lends
itself to anything if you want to convince me. I've been around the
block enough times to know there's enormous amounts of garbage Java
code out there, and that it doesn't inspire bad programmers to do
anything more than write bad Java code.
I don't magically change the way I think of coding when I start writing
Java. What I do do is alter the way I code slightly to account for how
that language is structured. Perl's OO design isn't perfect, but it is
good enough that you should be able to do just about anything you need
or would in another language. And to be honest I prefer some of the
flexibility it provides to stricter OO languages.
I'm not trying to convince you that Perl is the best language for every
problem, I'm simply pointing out that your assertion that Perl is only
good for x number of lines is naive. I have two Perl web apps, one that
exceeds 5000 lines of code in total in all the modules and the other
that's probably well over 15000, and both are incredibly easy to
maintain and extend as needed. Lines of code is not something I
consider when choosing Perl over another language (except that I can
usually write a similar application in far less than if I use Java or
C#), nor is maintenance, because if you can't write maintainable code
in one language it's unlikely you can do it in another as the
principles aren't language specific.
Matt
.
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