Re: Learning Perl - the Good and the Bad (Tutorials, Habits, and Tools, etc)
- From: "Paul Lalli" <mritty@xxxxxxxxx>
- Date: 30 Jan 2006 17:58:28 -0800
umptious@xxxxxxxxx wrote:
> In the same spirit: you seem to have an intellectual honesty problem.
>
> Or: read what I wrote, not what you wish I'd written..
I read exactly what you wrote. I just disagree with your opinions.
> But Llama is totally unique for a major language book in that it leaves
> out at least one key feature without which you can't understand the
> language properly - you can't even write a decent function to take a
> dot product.
You are creating examples which back up your opinion. You are stating
that the Llama is defficient because you can't write a subroutine to
create a dot product with just its given knowledge.
Let me count how many times in eight years of Perl programming I've
needed to write a program to compute a dot product........ Got it.
Zero.
Should I attempt to list all the subroutines you *can* write with what
the Llama gives you?
> As for the 128 line crap - well, even for writing programs this length
> a halfway comptent programmer should know what a reference is. I needed
> to before I'd gone over a fraction of this length.
Congratulations. So the Llama wasn't enough for you, personally. But
to suggest that it's crap because it leaves out this one feature and
isn't explicit about how much you personally needed that feature is
idiotic in the extreme.
> Note: I'm not criticizing Llama for being incomplete - I'm criticizing
> it for not clearly stating the (capitals for the rude and the brain
> dead, Paul) UNUSUAL - UNIQUE AND DANGEROUS - LEVEL OF ITS
> INCOMPLETENESS.
More idiocy. References are an important and powerful feature of the
language, no question. These days I use them in about 70% of the
scripts I write. But for an introduction to the language, no, they are
not important. I completely agree with the authors that 90% of the
Perl programs a beginner will write does not need references.
> Or maybe you really do regard passing arrays to a function as an
> advanced topic?
Advanced? No. Important for a beginner? Also no.
> They're not - both those Internet tutorials I mentioned
> cover them at least well enough to give a beginner a fair view of the
> language.
I completely agree. perlreftut, perlref, and perlrefref are some of
the best perldocs out there.
> So much for that "We can't give you all of Perl in just a few
> hours" excuse - this is an utterly essential feature
We simply disagree.
> PS Thank you for being pointlessly rude - otherwise I would have had to
> spend time thinking of a way of phrasing the above so that you didn't
> look like an idiot.
For my part, I do apologize for the rudeness. I should have counted to
20 or so before posting. Further apologies if it extended into this
reply.
Now for the kicker - I completely agree that references should be
covered in the Llama, and I wish they were. My reason, however, is
that they are not as complicated as they are made out to be, and can be
taught with relative ease, not that they are vital to a beginner's
understanding of the language. My disagreement with you is that the
book is somehow either worthless or dangerously deceptive because of
their lack of being mentioned.
Paul Lalli
.
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