On Wed, May 16, 2001 at 11:58:07AM -0400, Adam Turoff wrote:
> It's not so much that Perl shouldn't have data structures or modules.
> I think what Stephen is saying (and he's not the only one) is that
> the bare minimum amount of Perl you *must* know to be productive
> is increasing. Either that, or we're giving the impression that
> it's increasing.
This may have gotten lost in the noise, so I'll mention it again.
Since all the features of perl4 are still in perl5 (mod a few minor
differences) it should still be possible to teach perl5 as you did
perl4, as a small utility language/shell scripting replacement.
Simply ignore anything that might get in the way of someone just
wanting to read a log file.
We could provide a seperate man page (perlsmall?) which describes this
mini-language-within-a-language. It would skip things like OO (or
only as much as you need to use the occasional CPAN module), Unicode,
odd syntax details, etc... and focus on things like basic regexes,
string and file handling, basic data structures, map, grep, etc...
In fact, you could start with the perl4 man page (or Camel/Llama 1) as
the basis.
Seems a lot more productive than just pining about the olden days when
men were men, Perl was small and 640K was enough for anyone.
--
Michael G. Schwern <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> http://www.pobox.com/~schwern/
Perl6 Quality Assurance <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> Kwalitee Is Job One
...and I pull out the Magnum from under the desk where I keep it in case
someone laughs at a joke that's so dry it's got a built in
water-fountain, and blow the lot of them away as a community Service.
-- BOFH
