This isn't a help thread, just an "ugh" thread. What an ugly language! I've been working with it at a new job and...yeesh. Even VHDL and Verilog are easier to look at. I've gotten through the first two chapters and I'm starting to wrangle with the debugger. Yikes.
I don't write code of any kind, but I know a few people who write Perl and they swear it is the best coding language ever. Maybe when you get more experience with it you'll feel the same.
i haven't used perl in a while... i only really used it for some cgi scripts and the message board on my website but i switched everything to php a few years ago. i never really found it all too frustrating though. once you get used to it, it becomes like second nature. the most frustrating thing i ever ran into would be forgetting to close a bracket somewhere and breaking the whole script, then having to backtrack and look for where i messed up... but that can happen with any language.
Im taking perl for the second time, because I got a C...and being I wanna be specialized on the net kinda need a good mark in perl. that being said my teacher scolds me more for reading the news paper than codding bad.
What you need to do is tell yours supervisors that Perl is bad and they should feel bad. Then start coding in Python, which will do everything Perl will (and more) without the syntax-suck.
It's been a good while since I've done anything in Perl. The good news about Perl is its resemblance to C. The bad news about it its inferiority to PHP. But that seems to be the way it goes in computer-land: bad programming languages never die. My alma mater offered two courses in COBOL and a class in FORTRAN, but only offered Java and LISP as special courses and only added a web programming class towards the end of my time there. Said course covered multiple web languages. Oh, and there was almost no coverage of visual programming whatsoever. But apparently there was method to the seeming madness, because tons of companies refuse to dump old code. Of course, we really should be converting everything to LOLCODE.
I imagine error messages would actually be welcome. Something like (segmentation fault) "I iz outside ur memory eating ur bitz"
I'm actually kinda partial to Perl, though admittedly I looked into PHP a little bit and I like that you can on the fly mix it with html just by enclosing it in a <php> tag. As mentioned above, at least it resembles C even with the goofy extra syntax stuff like dollar signs. But then, I really enjoyed programming in Prolog... I think I'm broken.
Despite my distaste for Perl, I too enjoyed Prolog. I think I was one of the few to "get it" the few times it was used in class.
For context, my reason for being wary of/frustrated with Perl is that I learned about 2 chapters of it from the Alpaca book and then was dropped right into "Fix this monstrous Perl script that launches a hardware simulation program, plugs in variables and gets the program to simulate." So...as of right now...I'm kinda frustrated with it. Ah well. Crash course vs. slow learning is a weird way to learn a language, at least for me. Both of the langauges I've learned before have been the slow & steady method - four months of semester learning on the subject before I'm doing anything difficult.
I did my internship at the Canadian Space Agency working with ASP using VBScript. This wasnt one of the languages I had learned while studying programming so it was kind of a rude awakening. That was back in 2000.... havent worked in programming since. Maybe i should start it again from scratch.
