If you choose software engineering as a career you'll prolly learn like 25 languages. Perl is just so damn handy -- it's easy to do things you'll frequently want to do -- that it's likely to be one of them. If you're not a software engineer, then Perl is a good language for casual programmers to use for the many tasks you'll want to automate on your computer.
More specifically, Perl is excellent at taking string-based information from one process or file and converting it into the format required by some other process or file ... hence it's reputation as a "glue language" ... gluing things together. Again, this is something you'll likely find yourself doing again and again over the years. Perl is NOT good at partitioning large bodies of code into sections which only certain other sections of code can access or modify ... if you want to stop one part of a single process from modifying data in another part, well, that's hard to do. Put another way, to highlight the advantage, there's almost no information within a single Perl process that you can't access or modify from within that process. It's a powerful tool; use with care. "Tone" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > Hello, I'm interested in programming languages and am somehow new to this field.I > am moving from Windows to Linux and am interested in engaging in the programming > world. What I would like to ask is: why would I be interested in learning Perl ?Give > me the main reasons why I may be interested in Perl rather than in PHP, ASP.... Is > Perl any useful for Artificial Intelligence development?Actually I am interested in > collaborating to the "Technological Singularity" but I don't know how can I help and > I don't know where to start.Perhaps I should learn LISP or something instead of Perl > and so I would like to know what do you have to say.Because it seems that Perl is > not dead so there must be good reason for that... Thanks, Tone. __________________________________________________________________ New! Unlimited Access from the Netscape Internet Service. Beta test the new Netscape Internet Service for only $1.00 per month until 3/1/04. Sign up today at http://isp.netscape.com/register Act now to get a personalized email address! Netscape. Just the Net You Need. -- To unsubscribe, e-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED] For additional commands, e-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED] <http://learn.perl.org/> <http://learn.perl.org/first-response>
