Glen Mehn <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> writes:
GM> personal preference, I think.
GM>
GM> And perl/python is apples and oranges: python is object oriented
GM> (like java, C++), while perl is more like C.
GM>
GM> A lot of people take issues with perl's lack of standards-- where
GM> {}, (), etc, may or may not be required.
GM>
GM> As to having {} and ;, it's a matter of the language structure,
GM> and that's all. Whether or not you use them is simply a matter of
GM> how you structure the language.
For someone who's just starting out, doing anything non-trivial in
Perl can be extremely confusing; there's a fundamental difference
between $foo{'bar'} and $foo->{'bar'}, and it's not obvious how they
relate to the variables $foo, @foo, and %foo (which are all
different).[1]
For someone who's just beginning, good language picks are probably:
-- Python: very simple language structure, little punctuation,
reasonably high level of intuitiveness. Free tools, good OO
semantics, reasonable documentation. http://www.python.org/
-- Java: C-like syntax (good if you eventually want to learn C),
object-oriented with relatively sane semantics (good if you
eventually want to learn C++). Downsides are a lack of free tools
and a fairly slow compile-execute cycle. http://java.sun.com/
-- C: most Linux programs are actually written in C, so if you want to
"hack on Linux stuff" you'll probably eventually want to learn C.
Plusses: standardization, good books, ubiquity; minuses: pointers,
explicit memory management. No one Web site, but _The C
Programming Language_ (Kernighan and Ritchie) is the canonical
reference book, and isn't bad to learn from.
[1] In particular, if you don't know Perl already: $foo is a scalar
(number or string); @foo is an array of scalars; %foo is a
string-to-scalar hash table. $foo[0] is the first element in the
array @foo, and $foo{'bar'} is the element referenced by the string
'bar' in the hash %foo. A scalar can also be a reference to some
other variable, though (this is the only way to build nested data
structures); this is a similar concept to pointers in C, only more
hackish. So if $foo is a reference to a hash, $foo->{'bar'} gets the
'bar' element from that hash, but not necessarily (though possibly)
the 'bar' element from %foo.
For contrast, in Python, you similarly have numbers, strings, arrays,
and "dictionaries". The variable foo can be exactly one of these
types (or some other object type); foo[0] gets the first element of
foo, if foo is an array; foo['bar'] gets the element referenced by the
string 'bar' if foo is a dictionary. There's none of the "well,
depending on the bit of punctuation afterwards, $foo could actually
reference pretty much anything" nature that Perl has.
Not, mind you, that it isn't useful to learn Perl; a fair number of
scripts, including many important things on a Debian system, are
written in Perl, and if what you're doing is vast amounts of
text-processing then it's even the right tool. But IMHO the
documentation is hard to get around unless you know what you're
looking for; it's probably a poor first language, and a good third or
fourth one.
--
David Maze [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://people.debian.org/~dmaze/
"Theoretical politics is interesting. Politicking should be illegal."
-- Abra Mitchell
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