From: Albert Schlef Date: 2009-01-13T09:01:55+09:00 Subject: Re: a good career choice ? Tim Greer wrote: > Albert Schlef wrote: > >> Tim Greer wrote: >>> I got the impression you were making a claim that >>> Perl is [...] some old archaic language that people >>> shouldn't waste time with >> >> 13 years ago I was programming in Perl (v5). I loved it. Until I had >> to return a file handle from a function. > [...] > As for returning a file handle from a function, you could do that, but > maybe it was not a method you agreed with using I was referring to the \*HANDLE syntax. I didn't understand it. At that time it was important for me to understand exactly what was happening under the hood because I was trying to use Perl as a study aid for an Operating System course. I didn't want my file handles dup(2)licating around. The manual page gave this syntax as some "voodoo". Same story for Perl's OO. I wasn't a big fun of this methodology back then, but many libraries used it so I had to understand what happens under the hood to really master this language. There wasn't any material on the net explaining how Perl implements its OO. That's very different from Ruby, where you can find diagrams explaining exactly how its OO is implemented. When I read some parts of Perl's man pages I get the feeling they wink at me saying "ha ha! ha ha! use this syntax. Why? Oh, that's complicate to explain. Tim knows, Tim knows. Or buy the Holy book of the Camel, the masters are explaining it there. ha ha!" They even discourage you from looking at Perl's source code. "Beware all ye who enter here". "There's no BNF, just paw your way through the...". That's very different from Ruby where I, a relative newbie, can easily read its source code and benefit from it. -- Posted via http://www.ruby-forum.com/.