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Migrating to perl?

Steve Holden sholden at holdenweb.com
Fri Jan 5 08:11:27 EST 2001 
Joel Ricker <joejava at dragonat.net> wrote in message
news:V%c56.4648$of7.221797 at news1.atl...
> Wow, great answers for a probably frequent question.  Thanks everyone!
>
> Skip Montanaro wrote in message ...
> >
[...]
>
> Sounds great.  Perl always seems to be very unix-centric which tends to
bug
> me.  Only one book I've gotten on Perl went for a cross-platform approach
to
> perl (Perl Black Book).  Another question.  I just downloaded Activestates
> build for Python.  I went there first since I've got accustomed to their
> services.  Is a good build?  As good as Pythonlabs?  Better?
>
ActivePython is pretty much the "BeOpen 2.0" release of Python plus the Mark
Hammond Win32 extensions, with the added bonus that the help files have been
munged into a Windows .chm (HTML help) file.  It's great stuff, and the only
distribution of 2.0 I've found necessary to install on Windows (given that
on Windows, unlike Unix, I don't compile Python from source).

> >Your comment about Perls multitude of contexts really rings true with me.
> I
> >use Perl in the guise of Mason these days to maintain the Mojam.com
> website.
> >(Mason is great, by the way.  I just wish it used Python. ;-) A couple
> weeks
> >ago I thought I had all the reference stuff figured out, but then this
> >morning it all came crashing down on me (again).  Ah well, back to the
> >perlref manpage...
>
>
> No kidding.  I just but Object Oriented Perl by Damian Conway and I
thought
> I had the idea and concepts down and by the end of the third chapter it
all
> came crashing down.  Things are working that shouldn't and vice versa.  I
> probably need to take a look at the perlref manpage myself but I'm
> suspecting it may be the new build from Activeperl but I'm getting too
> fustrated to dig into it.  I could post for help but I already know the
> answer that I'll be given:
>
> perldoc perltoot
>
Well, you'll often get links to web pages in replies on this newsgroup, but
the "eat s**t and die, m*****f**ker"-style hostility observed in other
groups from time to time very rarely happens in c.l.py.  I did consider
posting such a response to your question (as a joke...) followed by some
helpful advice, but

a) it goes against the grain of this group, and I would have doubtless
needed asbestos pants myself then, and

b) I knew you'd get good advice from the many worthies who are the mainstay
of the group.

[...]
>
> Joel

By now you should be running Python happily.  I was a Perl user once, but
when I came to the object-oriented mess I said "blerch" and decided to look
for a sensible language.  I've found that, and more, in Python, and wouldn't
consider Perl nowadays.  This is NOT to say that Perl doesn't have its
uses -- as the timbot pointed out, it has "optimized the snot" out of r-e
pattern matching.  But it began to seem as though almost any random string
had meaning in Perl, and I don't have time for that sort of nonsense.

Good luck.

I-used-to-program-in-Perl-but-i'm-all-right-now-ly y'rs  - steve
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