Scripting question, [small programming question

[Les Mikesell]

On Wed, 2005-05-25 at 09:02, Claude Jones wrote:

> As to your comments above, Les, I have been doing some research and reading, 
> and had decided to work on Bash and Python. I'm currently reading a book on 
> Bash, and I bought one yesterday to introduce myself to Python. I had started 
> to work on Perl a few years ago, but never could get the steam up to really 
> get a grip on it. Lately, I've come up with comment after comment in my 
> research/readings on this subject, many by Perl programmers who've been doing 
> it for years, about the virtues of Python. 
> 
> What do you guys think? 

I think perl was really designed to be your second program language -
that is, the one you turn to when sh, awk, sed, etc. don't quite handle
the problem you want to solve - instead of being the one you learn
first.  As such, you'd already understand programming concepts,
regular expressions and have a favorite style that perl can mimic
closely.  Python people like to make fun of the perl concept that
"there's more than one way to do it", but you'll often find in
practice that the problem you need to solve is already 90% done and
you just need some slight variation of your own.  Perl generally
lets you embed existing programs, run them and use their output,
or you can even embed perl into an existing program to use its
strengths.  With an object oriented approach and a mentality that
says there's only one way to do things, you'll end up throwing out
working code that has years of testing behind it and repeating most
of the old mistakes yourself. 

-- 
  Les Mikesell
    lesmikesell at gmail.com