Elysian Shadows

Ok, I have been thinking about learning Perl instead of C++. Don't ask me why but i just am not getting motivated enough to learn C++. And I have been reading bout Perl and I am liking it. I was just wondering you guy's opinion on Perl and/or past experiences with it.

Disclaimer: I have no idea what I was saying in the following and I know nothing about Perl.

The problem I have with scripting languages is that I never know what to do with them, you know what I mean? Sure I can make a hello world script, or a basic calculator, but then what? I'm not saying great things aren't possible with (insert language here, for example PHP), but other than one of the greatest server-side scripting languages (which is amazing when I'm developing a web page), what would I use it for as a stand-alone language? Guess what I'm trying to say is that I know with C++ I can use SDL or OGL to make a graphics intensive executable that runs on anyone's computer without having to have an interpreter installed, whereas something like Perl I would play with it on a web server to learn basic concepts but wouldn't know where to go after that (without learning a new language).

I would say use it to learn basic programming concepts (and to have Perl in your toolbox), then switch to something more suitable to what you actually want to accomplish (with I suppose might even be Perl itself if you're making your own web page).

I can agree with you there dandymcgee, I've run into that a few times with scripting languages asking 'What can I do with it"... the latest I was turned on to is Lua and that's simply because the ES Team is like, Lua is badass, we're doing this and this with it which caused me to look up other uses and what not. But yeah, essentially what I find to be easier is not to go into a language and asking what to do with it, but come up with a project that I want to do and see what tools make it the easiest or are the most useful. Say it calls for Perl, never used it, but after seeing some examples of how others used it to achieve a similar goal, then the fun begins and I look into said language with a purpose... how do I get my skills to be up to a level to use it for that. I cannot wait to get Lua in my game engine and start emulating some ideas I've seen and go in a few directions that I think may help me out and make life simpler with Lua vs straight C++.

i'm going for like a database of recipes (that converts stuff to biger messures and other things liek that)

That's an interesting post dandymcgee.

Technically if a programming language is turing complete, then it can everything that any other turing complete language can. When you say scripting language, I assume you mean a programming language that is interpreted.. rather than compiled, in which case the main concern is the efficiency of the language. They should be able to accomplish the same task (given equal libraries, and of course computational power).

It's actually quite interesting, because I'm at the opposite end I don't like going down the ladder of abstraction (unless I absolutely have to). The online communities I go to are all about Python, Lisp, Haskell, Ruby. Here it's like C and C++, which is a refreshing change. Of course, the domains are quite different (game programming vs web startups). Programming languages are actually headed down a very interesting path. With multi-cored processors, we'll have to start programming concurrently. This is done with pure functional languages because they are stateless, and their functions have no side effects. I can imagine game programming would be pretty difficult without states.. but I've heard there are ways you can fake them.

Perl is what we bust out when we need a quick-and-dirty script to do something useful. It's amazing at text processing, regular expressions, and performing tasks on Linux/Unix-based systems.

It was also the first real (non-web) language that I ever learned. It's great for a beginner.

I actually did Perl for a while and I made some fun stuff :D I actually plan on using it for tools as well because it's good at parsing and such. That and I might use it on a website, never know :D

(on a side note I have ubuntu on my old laptop and I love it. Only my wireless card isn't working... I have to get that sorted out before I can really start digging into it :D )

I use to teach perl languge to my student. I love this language because Perl provides infrastructure for many common programming tasks, such as string and list processing. Other tasks, such as memory management, are handled automatically and transparently. Programmers coming from other languages to Perl often find that whole classes of problems that they have struggled with in the past just don't arise in Perl.

dandymcgee wrote:The problem I have with scripting languages is that I never know what to do with them, you know what I mean? Sure I can make a hello world script, or a basic calculator, but then what?

Then Perl is similar to C/C++ in that aspect, until you start using third-party APIs.

dandymcgee wrote:what would I use it for as a stand-alone language? Guess what I'm trying to say is that I know with C++ I can use SDL or OGL to make a graphics intensive executable that runs on anyone's computer...

The same can be said about Perl:
http://sdl.perl.org/index.html
http://graphcomp.com/pogl.cgi

There are quite a few bindings for Perl that seem to interlace the two languages' commonly used APIs. They're both quite competitive and each excel in their own fields. You're not at any real disadvantage by learning one over the other, but learn both if you don't get too clammy in Perl.

GyroVorbis wrote:Perl is what we bust out when we need a quick-and-dirty script to do something useful. It's amazing at text processing, regular expressions, and performing tasks on Linux/Unix-based systems.

It was also the first real (non-web) language that I ever learned. It's great for a beginner.

jobypollard wrote:It's amazing at text processing, regular expressions, and performing tasks on Linux/Unix-based systems.

What the hell made you think it was a good idea to revive a 5-month-old thread by copy/pasting a sentence from Falco's post??

@Weary: by Dandymcgee on Dec 30, 2009 Better late than never. I'll forgive you for jobypollard's dumbass revival.

dandymcgee wrote:

GyroVorbis wrote:Perl is what we bust out when we need a quick-and-dirty script to do something useful. It's amazing at text processing, regular expressions, and performing tasks on Linux/Unix-based systems.

It was also the first real (non-web) language that I ever learned. It's great for a beginner.

jobypollard wrote:It's amazing at text processing, regular expressions, and performing tasks on Linux/Unix-based systems.

What the hell made you think it was a good idea to revive a 5-month-old thread by copy/pasting a sentence from Falco's post??

@Weary: by Dandymcgee on Dec 30, 2009 Better late than never. I'll forgive you for jobypollard's dumbass revival.

D'oh! Perhaps someone should write an app that generates a warning if it detects an overly abundant period of time between replies.

wearymemory wrote:I can't help but think that jobypollard is a bot, what with the sex advertisements and copying the posts of other people

dude this topic is sooo!!! dead...

dude... that was like a month ago... its dead... KEEP IT DEAD

eatcomics wrote:I actually did Perl for a while and I made some fun stuff :D I actually plan on using it for tools as well because it's good at parsing and such. That and I might use it on a website, never know :D

(on a side note I have ubuntu on my old laptop and I love it. Only my wireless card isn't working... I have to get that sorted out before I can really start digging into it :D )

i had the same problem... i actually cant remember how i solved it but i think i may have reinstalled the driver or somthing... just google it and you should find the solution

WSPSNIPER wrote:

eatcomics wrote:I actually did Perl for a while and I made some fun stuff :D I actually plan on using it for tools as well because it's good at parsing and such. That and I might use it on a website, never know :D

(on a side note I have ubuntu on my old laptop and I love it. Only my wireless card isn't working... I have to get that sorted out before I can really start digging into it :D )

i had the same problem... i actually cant remember how i solved it but i think i may have reinstalled the driver or somthing... just google it and you should find the solution

sorry I fixed that long ago xD