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Five Common Misconceptions (Summarized)

by Anonymous Monk
on Dec 01, 2005 at 22:14 UTC ( [id://513453]=note: print w/replies, xml ) Need Help??


in reply to Five Common Misconceptions While Learning Perl

1. Everyone who goes through the trouble of writing a Perl tutorial must know what they are talking about. Everyone who goes through the trouble of writing a Perl tutorial should know what they are talking about. However, Rule 1 ("Other people are a constant source of disappointment") applies to programming, as to all other walks of life.

2. Prior experience in another language makes you qualified to write perl without learning the basics. Prior experience in another language will give you just enough confidence to shoot yourself in the foot with Perl, repeatedly.

3. The documentation is terse and hard to navigate. This is false. The documentation is verbose, rambling, riddled with confusing attempts at humor, needlessly complex, and hard to navigate. It is, however, not terse.

4. The Perl community is an automatic answer machine. False. Tom Christiansen was the automatic answer machine; but he was decomissioned after the CIA watched the movie _War Games_, and grew afraid of Artificial Intelligences like him.

5. Modules are a crutch for people who can't do it themselves. Again, false. Modules are a crutch for people who can do it for themselves. They allow huge groups of people to suffer from exactly the same set of bugs simultaneously, rather than having to invent their own, distinct, set of customized bugs. This allows exploit writers to target a larger segment of the population, and keeps security professionals employed to stop them.

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Re: Five Common Misconceptions (Summarized)
by holli (Abbot) on Dec 01, 2005 at 22:46 UTC
    ++ #outstanding! :)


    holli, /regexed monk/
Re: Five Common Misconceptions (Summarized)
by apotheon (Deacon) on Dec 31, 2005 at 12:26 UTC

    Prior experience in another language will give you just enough confidence to shoot yourself in the foot with Perl, repeatedly.: Excellent point. I think juggling makes a good metaphor for programming in this case. Juggling small balls (using BASIC), juggling bowling pins (using Java), and juggling chainsaws (Perl) all use some of the same skills, but you had better damned well know something specific about juggling chainsaws before you try it blindfolded.

    print substr("Just another Perl hacker", 0, -2);
    - apotheon
    CopyWrite Chad Perrin

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