Hacker Newsnew | past | comments | ask | show | jobs | submitlogin

I disagree with your implication that Perl is suitable for newbs but should be discarded for "better languages" by people who are interested in learning.

In fact I would invert your statement: I think Perl is not a good choice for people without good programming habits, but for those who know how to use it, it offers more power of expression than most of its peers.

(Also, datum: count me in as an "older person" preferring Perl for most tasks despite knowing Ruby, Python, JS and half a dozen other languages.)



I never meant to imply that Perl is suitable for newbs, but rather most scripting languages are. I would much rather newbs learn another language, in fact. I changed my wording in my original post to reflect that.

Also, for my background, I learned Perl as my first scripting language and after writing a ~1k line code project in it, decided that for anything over 200 lines I would rather use Java. Later when I learned Python I was vindicated in that almost everything I instinctively disliked about Perl was absent in Python. Since then I have learned many other languages as well, and I also know Perl the language better than most of my co-workers




Guidelines | FAQ | Lists | API | Security | Legal | Apply to YC | Contact

Search: