laziness, impatience, and hubris | |
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Re: Re: Does Knowing Perl Help or Hinder Learning another Languageby arhuman (Vicar) |
on Aug 27, 2001 at 18:41 UTC ( [id://108136]=note: print w/replies, xml ) | Need Help?? |
UPDATE : 1) this post is supposed to be an answer to the main thread. (Sorry herveus, I goofed when answering...) 2) Thanx dragonchild for pointing out an error (when I switch from hash to array, I should also remove 'keys' ;-) IMHO you can/should learn from every language. (Even with COBOL I learnt a lot about file IO, Indexed files, EBCDIC prob...) I believe that each new language may give you another way to see (and thus solve) problems... Pascal taught procedural programming, and OO basic programming (it was an object pascal). C taught me to use memory and loops eficiently and gave me a first contact with "Unix semantic". <UPDATE>> Smalltalk influenced the coding of a lot of experienced coders here... Ruby influenced the coding of another experienced coder here... </UPDATE>> Prolog taught me to think in term of predicate, recursivity and backtracking. Lisp taught list processing, but I didn't understand/like them util I've found Perl... (Btw in my mind Lisp will always be more about lambda calculus than about list) I really discovered list with Perl (Lovely map and grep...). I hardly imagine using other structure as efficient and evolutive as hashes... the for my $var (@mytab) definitly took over my old C for(my $i=0;$i<=$#mydata;$i++) It's not only a matter of syntax, it's a way to 'see' your structure, to 'think' your interface (to be always evolutive, using hashes..) and your looping differently... So, to be short a new language will often bring you new solutions/point of view (in the 'old time' people were saying 'paradigm' ;-) which can only enhance your ability to solve problem cleanly and efficiently (ie: enhance your programming skill) "Only Bad Coders Code Badly In Perl" (OBC2BIP)
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