A Perl of Thoughts
Yesterday I spent my first full day coding in Perl. In the past I have done next to nothing with the language...only tinkering with a few lines here and there of existing scripts.
I would definitely say it's one of those "get-$hit-done" languages. Very little friction. I mostly related concepts back to what I knew from Python. I do think it's a language that one needs to be on their toes if they want to produce good code. "get-$shit-done" doesn't necessarily mean "write-readable-code".
Here's a few bits that I thought were neat:
Variable Interpolation
$name = "T-Bone Walker";Prints: "Great blues music by T-Bone Walker"
print "Great blues music by $name";
That saves a lot of time especially when constructing things like HTML. It helps keep code clean by reducing concatenations.
Function with Arguments
This threw me sideways:
sub adder{
$sum = 0;
foreach $_ (@_) {
$sum += $_;
}
return $sum;
}
print add(1,2,3); # prints 6
print add(1,2,3,4,5); #prints 15
print add(1..5); # prints 15
It's unnatural to me to not declare function signatures but passing arguments as an array is an interesting concept. Lot's of flexibility.I feel like the last person on earth learning to program with Perl but it is still exciting. I love feeling out new concepts especially with dyno-packed languages like Perl.
posted by Richard @ 9:28 AM
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