I have been using perl since 1994. My original attraction to it was
the C type power but without as much complexity (arrays created and
manipulated on the fly, easy file handling, text manipulation). As a
Unix administrator I have perhaps used the korn shell more since then
but perl is always the language that I somehow return to when the
shell is not quite enough for the job at hand. Especially when the
job at hand has started to grow too big for ksh.
The reference book at that time was "Programming Perl" by Larry Wall
and Randall L. Schwartz. The presentation in that early edition was
humorous and easy to digest and is still a favourite techie book I
would not discard despite being out of date (perl version 4). I
particularly found amusing the idea of Job (as in the book of Job in
the Bible) using perl to keep an inventory and output to a clay tablet
printer (i.e. send output to /dev/ctp).
Since then we have had an explosion of languages, each with their
uses, strengths and weaknesses but somehow perl still has it's place
among them. Probably because it has been so widely available on so
many platforms for so long.
Jon Wilks.
2008/10/15 Damian Brasher <lug@???>:
> Unearthly hour,
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> The learning curve so far has been relatively steep, but once through the
> Llama book and practicing with small scripts now after several months
> slowly picking my way through the syntax I can read it and make
> subroutines work and play with functions, manipulate context and regex's.
> Coding is much smoother than in Bash and for the approx. 600 lines I have
> just written Bash would have become too cumbersome. I really like the
> warnings and use of strict pragma, the feedback has been understandable
> and very decipherable for debugging. I also like the syntax, it's easy on
> the eye, curly, and lends itself to readability and fits in well with my C
> knowledge. Larry Wall is a clever chap! Llama is a must read though, now
> one of my favorite tech books of all time, Schwart, Pheonix & foy actually
> managed to make me laugh a few times just at the right time:) not sure who
> the funny one of the three is.
>
> It's great so far - still new to me but have just finishing tapping out my
> first reasonable sized app. Yep, shhhhh, you guessed it
> diap-alpha-dev-v0.1 in Perl at long last...bit br0ken in places but
> written.
>
> Damian
> --
> Damian L Brasher
> http://www.diap.org.uk - Quick and low-cost way to make an environment
> more robust by backing up data in multiple places.
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> --
> Please post to: Hampshire@???
> Web Interface: https://mailman.lug.org.uk/mailman/listinfo/hampshire
> LUG URL: http://www.hantslug.org.uk
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