I’m a Recent convert to Perl,having only started using it a few months ago.Before this I had Handful experience with Shell Scripting which was quite useful.But switching to something new is always somewhat uncomfortable because there’s new syntax to learn, and sometimes whole new ways of doing things.Same is the case with Perl,but the pain was offset by the sheer joy of being able to do so many formerly clumsy tasks so simply and elegantly.
Many People Think that Perl is pretty much unreadable..But the fact is Perl is as unreadable as a terminal is unusable..
Before Starting this article i would like to dispose one thing than i am no perl expert.I just want to share these so that you might be intersted with this beautiful language.Enough With the introduction.Lemme dive into the Matter.
—->Perl’s pattern matching can be a little confusing at first,but once u get familiar,it becomes natural,and so much easier than anything else you’ve ever worked with.If you are used to “sed” and”awk”,then welcome to super combination of those two…
—->I’ve always felt Python to be sluggish in comparison to Perl, but never had any stats to back it up.I’m not sure if the speed advantage still exists.Now Plz dont start Flame Wars on this…:)
—->Perl has ways to cut down on the amount of code you need to write (like using a regex on a file and then sticking the whole thing into a hash).
—->Though it becomes tedious to write some bigger applications in Perl(again its easy if u have a good session management builtin),its great for manipulation and quick and dirty scripts, without a doubt.
—->Also because OO is a hack and everything can be accessed as a hash, so you can list anything the hash includes. Don’t know if any other languages do this.
—->AFAIK the Benchmarks tests,Perl leads the way.I would suggest going through this
“Python vs Perl vs Java vs C++”
“PerlOpenGL (POGL) vs PyOpenGL”
Thats All for now guys.Enough of reading Grab the Book and Share the joy of Learning a Poweful language.
Pretty Nice Post Kranny.And coming to Perl,I Never got a chance to put my hands thru it,But it is always unreadable to me as ppl says 🙂
I wish I new Perl better, but I see no reason to learn it for anything other than the experience (I like to learn). I also have the same feeling on Ruby…
A very good Post. I’ve tried Perl. I’ve tried Python. Python is easier to write for me as a beginner, but Perl is more available. Really want to understand them both but my time is limited.
Try some other scripting languages as well – let me recommend Ruby and PHP.