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I remember I wrote an IRC bot about a decade ago in Perl and boy howdy is it a weird language. Being such an old language though (Perl 5 was already over 25 years old at the time) it's very easy to just code until you run into a problem, Google the problem, find a solution and keep working. On top of that, being a language where the only real idiom is "do it however the gently caress you want" there's relatively few arguments about what the best way to accomplish a particular task is so you don't get bogged down in the StackOverflow-style arguments about how x or y solution is "better" with very little elaboration on why. In my opinion those are attractive (and underrated) qualities about a language for an inexperienced programmer. Perl is easier to get started with. As mentioned above, Perl is also designed to be weird, rather than being weird by mistake, and the unintentional weirdness tends to get corrected so the language ends up having fewer annoyances for an individual programmer over time than something like PHP. Perl is easier to keep using. I wish I still had some of the source code for that bot so I could post it in here and be laughed at. I remember I talked in an IRC chat about a problem I was trying to solve and the weird old dude who did the original graphics layer overhaul for Dwarf Fortress called me an idiot and did something in a single line that had taken me 2 functions and a 2D array and I still hadn't actually cracked it. Then he tried to encourage me to use an external atomic decay RNG to roll dice for some reason. Those were the days.
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Jan 10, 2020 21:08
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It definitely comes with caveats. Asking for help can get you ten different answers from three different people. On top of that, 10 years ago Raku didn't exist yet so you'd occasionally go to download something from CPAN and it would have some bizarro OO implementation with hostile syntax. That still happens but people who actually want OO Perl can do more than just write terrible packages now.
Makrond fucked around with this message at 03:13 on Jan 11, 2020 |
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Jan 11, 2020 03:09
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