And now for my real comment

Post #178,487 by ben_tilly 10/8/04 3:34:09 PM Reply	And now for my real comment If someone didn't know any of the STL stuff that you used, but had some half-understood samples around to start with and flailed around for a while until giving up, what would the final result look like? What would that code do? I don't think that Todd's attempt was particularly unreasonable given where he is in Perl. I also don't think that you should judge what Perl is like to use based on it. I furthermore submit that if you judged the language that you mostly use by how you were judging Perl (ie how badly a beginner in that language can thrash around without making progress), it would come out sucking just as badly. No, you're not a Perl programmer. Which is fine. But until you care to learn the language, please don't throw out gratuitous insults. Thank you, Ben I have come to believe that idealism without discipline is a quick road to disaster, while discipline without idealism is pointless. -- Aaron Ward (my brother)
Post #178,489 by Arkadiy 10/8/04 3:47:36 PM Reply	May be it's a hindsight thing but it seems to me that it took me less time and less effort to understand C, C++ and STL that it takes me to understand Perl. My "shudder" was not based on Todd's code, but rather on your code. As you say yourself, in Perl you have to be aware of the context at all times, and it's hard to stay aware because most of the time it "just works". In C++ I don't have such problem. May be because it became a second nature to me so long ago. Then again, in Smalltalk, I don't have such problem either. Probably because those languages don't try to magically do what I mean in most cases. -- ... a reference to Presidente Arbusto. -- [link\|http://itre.cis.upenn.edu/~myl/languagelog/archives/001417.html\|Geoffrey K. Pullum]
Post #178,520 by ben_tilly 10/8/04 6:13:45 PM Reply	It could be many things I know that when I learned to program in Perl, the course seemed much smoother than when I set out to learn other languages later. But then I realized that there were several factors: I misremember how long I took to learn Perl. It feels like I picked up the book and was writing it fluently a few weeks later. But I know that there were important parts of the language that I learned a lot later. When I was a baby in Perl, I tried to do baby-like things with it and succeeded. Now when I look at new languages, I over-reach. I immediately try to do things that I know how to do in Perl, and don't know enough to do them. When I learned Perl there was a constant feeling of accomplishment because I didn't know any way to easily do what I just learned. In other languages that sense is gone because whatever I just learned, I already knew how to do. As for context, I think that it is important to know about context, but ideally it sinks into being a reflex. It's handled by the same part of your brain that handles grammar and knows when, for instance, you have to switch from past to present to future tense. Certainly I am not conciously aware of thinking about context, though I can tell you what is going on with it at any given moment. Cheers, Ben I have come to believe that idealism without discipline is a quick road to disaster, while discipline without idealism is pointless. -- Aaron Ward (my brother)

Welcome to IWETHEY!