On Wed, May 23, 2001 at 02:59:13PM -0500, Tom Yarrish wrote:
> Hey all,
>
> Been reading the list for a little while, and had sort of a philosophy
> question for the group. I've been trying to learn Perl for some
> time (in fact, my company has offered to pay for me to take a Sun
> course on it). In the mean time I've been reading through the
> standard Perl books (Learning Perl and Programming Perl for starters),
> and trying to get an understanding. I'm starting to get the gist
> of the language (understanding how arrays work, functions, regex,
> etc), but my problem is how to "think" in a programming style. By
> that I mean how do I approach a possible perl program (like I want
> to do A, how do I go about doing it). What have people done/read/whatever
> to "think" in a perl state of mind. As I said, I've been trying
> for some time to learn Perl, but it seems like this is a hump I
> can't figure out how to get over.
Tom, can you please start by telling us a little about yourself
and the kind of work you're doing? That might give us some clues
on the path we should point you.
I came to Perl as a C programmer, so the way I started to think in
Perl was to unlearn all of the bondage and discipline of type
conversions, pointers and memory allocation. For sysadmins, the
path is different, and it's probably different still for biologists
and Java programmers. :-)
Thinking in Perl, to me, is about focusing on the data and focusing
on your problem. Once you get used to that, then thinking in terms
of scalars, hashes, and idioms (while(<>), open or die) will just come
naturally.
Z.
