Miguel Manso <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > I'm a programmer with 5 year of experience into Perl. I'm on that point > where you resolve problems without thinking on HOW you'll do it with > that language but only on the problem itself. > > Since Perl 6 started I've been following it. The conclusion I have is > they're making a whole new language and I'll have to learn it.
I have had a similar experience. Actually it was Perl 6, and and particular this chart http://www.ozonehouse.com/mark/blog/code/PeriodicTable.html that made me think that Perl was leaving the rails, and it was time to jump ship (to mix my metaphors). That was over a year ago now, and me and my colleagues haven't looked back. Yes there was a small amount of retraining, but conceptually Perl and Python aren't that far apart, its mostly a matter of syntax. The philosophies of the two languages are quite different though. Perl's TIMTOWTDI is diametrically opposed to Python's "There should be one - and preferably only one - obvious way to do it" and I think that is a major advantage when building bigger programs. Type "import this" at the Python interactive prompt to see more about Python's philosophy, and note that it seems like a direct reaction to Perl's baroque-ness. One thing I've definitely noticed is that Python had made me a better OO programmer. Its so clunky making objects in Perl that I almost never did except when making a library. In Python its so easy that I don't have to think about it. > This being said and, since I've to learn a new language, I've > started thinking in a new language. I've noticed Python is getting > more and more developers and many projects are being made. > > I've tryed to use python some times but I get frustrated very quick. I > get myself many times needing to figure out how to loop through a list, > declare an associative array, checking how to pass named parameters to > functions, and simple things like that. > > What I would like to know is if anyone had these problems and if you can > share that experience with me. I'm trying to minimize my > "frustration" :) I like to read books to retrain myself. That may not be your way, but if it is I'd recommend "Dive into Python" by Mark Pilgrim as a good first step. Its available for free in electronic form too. After that you could read Programming Python. Good luck! -- Nick Craig-Wood <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> -- http://www.craig-wood.com/nick -- http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list
