On Thu, 13 Mar 2003, Paul Makepeace wrote: > On Thu, Mar 13, 2003 at 11:12:45AM +0000, Aaron Trevena wrote: > > Anybody who reckons perl is hard to learn just hasn't tried to learn. > > Do you realise how obnoxious this kind of statement is? Probably not. > Imagine if you *had* tried to learn, and struggled, and then read > something like this. What would you think & feel? How might that then > colour your view of perl programmers? How quickly might you find > yourself buying the Python/Java/Pascal in a Nutshell book(s)?
ha! I have java in a nutshell and you certainly couldn't pick up java from it, if you want to learn java buy 'learning java', if you want to learn perl buy 'learning perl'. I'm hardly a super-hacker, I managed a CS Nat Dip and a Computing Degree but TBH that doesn't make you a good programmer. There is a really shallow slope for learning perl - compare this to the fuss needed to print hello world in Java. Even pascal and cobol seem tortuous to learn compared to perl, and neither had the brilliant support or documentation or literiture that perl has. If I learnt perl without any books or courses and colleagues without CS degrees have learnt enough to be very productive in a couple of evenings readings how can it be hard. Perl is only hard to learn if you haven't already learnt to program. If you are learning to program try pascal or basic then try c, perl and java. Java is harder than perl for non-programmers. If you never actually understood or learnt programming but are essentially a monkey trained to repeat the same 10 mouse clicks you learnt on your VB course then it will be hard, because you still don't understand programming. Its like complaining that driving a nice audi is hard because you've only ever driving a go-kart around a car park !! regards, A. -- Aaron J Trevena - Perl Hacker, Kung Fu Geek, Internet Consultant AutoDia --- Automatic UML and HTML Specifications from Perl, C++ and Any Datasource with a Handler. http://droogs.org/autodia
