On Wed, May 23, 2001 at 03:32:18PM -0500, Tom Yarrish wrote:
> Okay, in answer to your question, my background is mainly in
> Network/System Administration. Starting on Windows systems, and then
> moving into Unix/Linux systems after that. I've played around a bit with
> VB and C++. I've never had any problems with syntax, it's been the
> thought process behind it that's been an issue. To give an example, I've
> never been good with spoken languages. I can learn the syntax, but I
> can't "think" in that language, so I've always struggled. By that I mean,
> when (for example) someone is talking with another person in Spanish, do
> those people hear English, or do they hear Spanish and translate it to
> English in their heads.
Well, hopefully Perl will be easier for you than Spanish. :-)
First, Perl is an artificially designed construct that aims to let
you think about your problem the way you already think about it.
For you to be productive, you *shouldn't* need to conform overmuch
to some other thought model of the [computing] world.
For example, if you can think of a solution to a sysadmin problem
that involves reading a bunch of files, munging them and writing
them out again, you should be able to do it exactly that way.
Compare this to C where frequently you need to know APIs and
structures to manipulate your data, and on top of that, you need
to know the semantics C places over those data elements (zero-terminated
strings, etc.) Doubly so for C++. Triply so for poorly designed C++. :-)
Secondly, Perl *is* a philosophy. Standard idioms are there to make
the easy things easy. That is to say, if 95% of all Perl programs
use open(), there should be a simple, cheap, and intuitive way to check
for failures when you call open(). If 56.25% of all Perl progams iterate
over standard input line by line, there should be a cheap and common
idiom for doing that (while(<>){} -- try that in C or VB).
Finally, you should read some of what Larry Wall has written about Perl,
especially the 1st, 2nd, 3rd and 4th State of the Onion addresses, as
well as Perl as the first Postmodern Computer Language. You can find
them on http://kiev.wall.org/~larry/.
Hope this helps.
Z.
