perl

[markuskidd]

So what's the best online tutorial to get me up and running with perl? I don't really know anything at all about the language..

[cfmdobbie]

Erk.  Learning Perl is less fun than gouging your eyes out with a spoon.

I don't know any web resources, but I learnt all my Perl from the UNIX manual pages, the O'Reilly book "Learning Perl" and the "Perl Black Book".  Learning Perl is the particularly good one.

I'm sure there are tutorial web resources, I just don't know of any off-hand.  Try starting at http://www.perl.com/ and http://www.cpan.org/.

[swpalmer]

<rant>
A better thing to do would be to avoid Perl completely... it is one of the ugliest foulest languages I have ever seen.   In a sense it seems its design goals are the exact opposite of Java.. to make things as cryptic and as error-prone as possible.

If you like programming only with dots, backslashes, tildes, dollar signs, exclamations points, quotes, carets, ampersands, and anything else that doesn't relate to any commonly recognizable operation then perl is perfrect or you.
You can be sure that there is no need to obfuscate your code too... Perl code is written in obfuscated form to begin with.

If you don't believe me - just look at some Perl code before you pick up a Perl book and see if you can even get a hint of what it might be doing...
With C, Java, heck even Prolog... you can look at it without knowing the language and intuitively grasp some sort of understandingg of at least parts of it.. even if you don't know about the operators that are more obscure - like pointer dereferencing * and address of &...  With the Perl.. it will look like your cat walked over the keyboard.

If you like the regular expressions though, I hear Python does a good job.
</rant>

Games published by our own members! Check 'em out!

[Matzon]

it is one of the ugliest foulest languages I have ever seen.

So... You haven't tried Lisp?  

[markuskidd]

<rant>
</rant>

Well, what can I say but that it's not something I get a say in?  
'Course I'm trying to keep an open mind.

[cfmdobbie]

I wouldn't dismiss it completely out of hand, but it's not a language I'd write anything big in.  It's a very good language for quickly knocking up text-munging scripts and the like.

I do still say it's no fun to learn though!

[swpalmer]

Well if you have no choice (bummer) then I wish you good luck :-)

I can agree with cfmdobbie on some things... Perl does actually work at least :-)... it is a powerful language for certain things, just unnecessarily stupid with it's conventions and syntax.

[cfmdobbie]

What, you don't like code like $_=~/^([^0-9].*)$/;?

It's got some nice features.  As I said, I wouldn't use it for anything complicated or big, or in fact anything that has to be maintained.  The largest perl script I wrote was about 300KB (contained about 200KB of plain text) and auto-generated an entire EJB layer for me from a Sybase DB schema...  It was a nightmare!

Anyway, it's been proven that if you generated a random stream of characters, it's more likely to be a valid, compiling, syntax-correct Perl program than any other language.  I'm not kidding here.

(By the way, for those interested, the code above tests the last line of data you played with and returns true if it had started with a digit.  It also assigns that data to the variable $1.  Obvious, innit?)

[swpalmer]

(By the way, for those interested, the code above tests the last line of data you played with and returns true if it had started with a digit.  It also assigns that data to the variable $1.  Obvious, innit?)                          

Of course - I can tell by the $1 = part... oh wait a second...

[Breakfast]

I have heard good things about Python for the kind of stuff Perl is supposed to do as well. I'd suggest pretending to use perl but really using python and hoping no-one notices until you get paid.

Unless the job is to maintain someone else's perl in which case options include wailing, gnashing teeth and running away to join the foreign legion.

Games published by our own members! Check 'em out!

[Argoyle]

You wouldn't even need to enter the $_ =~ part since the perl interpreter uses $_ by default but maybe you added that for readability  

[Captain-Goatse]

Sorry, but lisp is the mother of god, hence Java descends from it.

[swpalmer]

Java descends from Lisp?  I think not

Smalltalk and C maybe.  Lisp is just one off those fringe languages that are only used by the ultra nerdy.  People that freak out about Emacs because they are stuck in the world of ASCII terminals and such.

[sma]

Java descends from Lisp?  I think not

Smalltalk and C maybe.

Actually, Smalltalk's root is Logo which is a simplified child of Lisp. Objective-C is a child of Smalltalk and C and Java has most of its features from that language. (I have to defend Lisp here which IMHO is one of the coolest languages

And to answer the original poster's question: Please consider Ruby as an alternative to Perl. It's a very readable language combining the better features of Perl with the power of Smalltalk plus an easy to learn syntax.

[maxcaleb]

Please oh please no more talk of functional languages