I just learned programming in Perl and it is ridiculously easy compared to C++. I learned it in 3 days and had a content management system running in 5 I don't use MySQL but I am learning that, too. Good luck, anyways! (btw, perl.about.com) isn't bad for quick little resources.

I read Blue's News and Slashdot. I thought that here I would be safe from the legions of perl-promoting fanboys, but now you've given them an open invitation to attempt to sway others to their twisting programming view (btw, it's not a programming language, it's a scripting language, just glorified .bat files).

You can tout it all you want, but my answer will always remain the same... "if you can't code quake in it, it's not a programming language". Now I'll just sit back and wait for some perl-nerd to make quake.pm.

My first real try at being a troll, whaddya think?

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Tony Zahn
Sofware Engineer, Achievement Technologies Inc.
Go Blue!

Hehe, well don't I just suck. I wanted to see what this whole programming thing was about, right, so I went and picked up 'Weekend Crash Course for C++'. Yeah, right. Two chapters and I was confused enough not to continue. Maybe it's because I don't think logically?...Least that's what my wife always says...lol...

=-Rigs-=

"Now, we gave you a promise and we are bound by that promise and damn you for asking for it! And damn me for agreeing to it! And damn all of us to hell, because that's exactly where we're going! We talked about peace. You didn't want peace. We talked about cooperation. You didn't want cooperation. You want war! Is that it? You want a war? Well you've got a WAR!"
- John Sheridan, Babylon 5

Have fun with Perl, Franz.

A good site to pick up little tidbits of Perl you haven't thought of before is at Perl Monks. http://www.perlmonks.org/

Does that mean they can make Starship Troopers the right way now? Actually, I liked the movie as it was, but I really wished they had the suits.

Forget pearl, learn Java Servlets and JSP's.

Python

If you're going to add scripting and database connectivity to Blues, why not look into PHP? It's usually faster than perl (depending on what you're doing), the syntax is a lot closer to C, and it's easier to change the html within the scripts...

Just plugging my fav web scripting language in this
religious debate....

A longer Python vs Perl http://www.garshol.priv.no/download/text/perl.html
Zugz

If you're going to add scripting and database connectivity to Blues, why not look into PHP?

Because the news database, message board, .plan tracker and everything else is already Perl and MySQL - I'd like to stick with the program. I'm aware that PHP may be easier in some ways to get a new system off the ground, but we already have Perl modules for various parts of the site that I can hook into, which makes it more convenient to develop the new stuff in Perl as well, rather than mix programming systems.

And not to feed the trolls but I'm not a zealot for any particular language, I just try to use the one most suited to the task at hand, and Perl is a useful intermediary between Shell and C.

-- Frans
News editor, http://www.bluesnews.com/
3D Gamers admin, http://www.3dgamers.com/

i hate PERL, and i hate most programming languages, i don tlike any of them, and i hate talking abotu them more. Frans, whyud id you post this as message of the day, cmon, its waY too nerdy, peopel want to hear a funny anecdote. also your links arent very fun. I wish blue was back

PHP also has some nasty backward compatibility evilness (e.g: case, legacy variable names), an ugly API (make your mind up, is it somefunction() or some_function()? Oh, you want to use objects now.. no?), optional stuff that shouldn't be (magic quotes or not - just make a decision and don't make us handle either, cos that just makes it useless :P), and a crappy object model which is taking a rewrite to fix.

It's also heavily web orientated, so learning PHP doesn't help much outside that environment (unless you actually want a bloated, slow (yes, PHP is actually slower than most other scripting languages in most cases) and badly designed language elsewhere). That's not to say PHP sucks; I just see a lot of flaws in it as a language that goes against my grain

Still, at least it's not ASP, or Perl, and at least there's *some* work to make it suck less.

*phew*

Anyway, if you want CGI stuff, I'd take a look at Ruby (www.ruby-lang.org), a *very* cool OO language that feels just right. Of course, nothing yet beats Perl for it's huge module pool, but Parrot (which Perl, Python and Ruby are all moving towards to varying degrees) will make that less of an issue in a few years.

Agree. Python > perl.

the book Learning Perl by ORA is best for learning Perl, the Programming Perl is more of the reference. i'm reading Learning Perl right, very nice book.

Perl and databases were made for each other. You can do so many things combining perl's excellent text manipulation capabilities and its support for databases. I wrote a web tutorial for perl beginners for my particular community if you want to read it. Also, a pretty decent book is "ActivePerl with ASP and ADO" by Tobias Martinsson. I'm really not into ASP, but it had some useful information. There's also some good perl ADO websites. Do a Google search for "perl ado." Have fun!

you guys do realize how long its been since there was ever a Xymph's Overture? This is a special occasion, we must celebrate =)

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MAY THE FORCE BE WITH YOU

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Let's take these one at a time.

Perl is not a scripting language. It's a programming language. Yes, with the right modules, you probably could code Quake in it. You'd be mad to try, but you probably could. People have written compilers with it.

Perl is not called PERL (it's not an acronym, and don't try and argue that it means Practical Extraction and Reporting Langauge, it doesn't, Larry Wall came up with that after the language was named).

Perl is much better than PHP. PHP is much slower, collapses under less pressure, and if you want a good example - visit Slashdot. Runs Perl (and they wouldn't switch to PHP even if they were starting from scratch). NASA use it. Amazon use it. The US military use it.

Perl is easy to learn. It's more flexible than PHP (you'll always find some nutter who wanted to do the same thing as you and has written a module :)).

Python, Ruby et al - no comment. Don't know them. I hear good things about both.

In tests, Perl is one of the fastest programming langauges out there (I can't remember the URL of the page, but some guy wrote the same program in about 50 different languages and Perl was really high up while PHP was really low down). With mod_perl, depending on the application, you can get pretty close to C speeds with it (although C will always be fastest).

Further information - http://www.perl.com/pub/a/2000/01/10PerlMyths.html.

- Bagpuss
http://www.chatbear.com/
Get your own free messageboard today (just like this one!)

i got a real question, does anyon e use LINEAR ALGEBRA in their jobs? What for

Have to say yes... worked for a software company that did flight planning software.... definitely a lot of linear algebra there!! =)

Perl isn't even remotely close to being "one of the fastest" programming languages, which isn't overly surprising given its architecture.

You're thinking of Doug Bagely's Shootout, in which he neglects to actually optimize PHP because he feels that the average person wouldn't. That's fine and dandy, but you won't find production environments like that, unless they're filled with people that will be taking that sales job at Radio Shack in the next month or two.

http://www.bagley.org/~doug/shootout

You'll see many comparisons for performance here. Note that this is a pretty small set of things that one will actually do when you program for a living, so you shouldn't really base your life decisions on it. His methodology isn't perfect, and many of the submitters (of which I am one) have done things they wouldn't do (for the sake of clarity) just to squeeze on that extra bit of time.

Perl is a very complex language, and it's impossible to learn in three days. You can learn a subset of Perl very quickly, but that's hardly synonymous with fluency. It's a novel and effective tool, but it's a rather inelegant language. This is something Perl 6 hopes to address.
The real reason it's used by a lot of sites, though, lies mostly in its age and use in history. People learn Perl, because other people have used Perl for web work, and then the cycle goes on. These people are hired out, and it becomes a defacto standard. There's no harm in that, but it really has nothing to do with Perl's technical qualifications.