Perl is good and very useful. Its gots LOTS of other modules (CPAN) available that u can grab and tons of examples 2go play with.
Really depends on what u're background is.
If u're going 2b doing a lot of 'glue-ing' then its the bees-kness. It can be a little hard 2 start off with (until u get used 2 its syntax)
If u're gonna do more stuff e.g. web sites, larger stuff then I'd say go take a look at Ruby on Rails. It can do gluing stuff as well but not got the library that Perl has.
Php is good 2 but more weby language and not got a lot of (built-in) hooks that Perl has.
Brendan Lally
Try Python.
Not much difference in capability.
Syntax is easier, less steep learning curve.
Ideal language for text hackery.
2007-04-22EDT11:33:28+00:00
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Not much difference in capability.
Syntax is easier, less steep learning curve.
Ideal language for text hackery.
If you can say that Python has "not much difference in capability", you're clearly doing that by looking at the language itself, but not comparing Python's equivalent of the CPAN.
The CPAN is what *makes* Perl far more useful.
2007-04-22EDT11:38:03+00:00
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The CPAN is what *makes* Perl far more useful.
A few suggestions Tom.
As Dave says, definitely try Python, it's simple and easy to learn and is the ultimate hack language and you will always find it on any *nix system. Since you are coming from Php, I 'd recommend Python over anything else.
For XML, you know you can't do better than XSLT.
All the above notwithstanding, if you want to give Perl a chance then by all means do. It can be a beautiful language to hack in and is one of the components in my toolbox.
2007-04-22EDT11:59:29+00:00
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As Dave says, definitely try Python, it's simple and easy to learn and is the ultimate hack language and you will always find it on any *nix system. Since you are coming from Php, I 'd recommend Python over anything else.
For XML, you know you can't do better than XSLT.
All the above notwithstanding, if you want to give Perl a chance then by all means do. It can be a beautiful language to hack in and is one of the components in my toolbox.
Python! I'll second what's been said already - it's my preferred just hack tool at the moment. Plus I'll throw in a couple of other interesting bits; namely it runs on lots of weird and wonderful devices (nokias and palms in particular) and ironpython promises to expose the whole of the .NET framework to a language that's actually nice to use.
2007-04-22EDT22:01:33+00:00
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