22 May 2003

Having the appropriate amount of fun

I'm learning Perl in the evenings. This is slightly mad, given the amount of stuff I've got on at the moment, but hey—what's a geek to do? I'd been thinking about learning a new language (properly this time, none of that 'just learning enough to write this program that I needed yesterday' business) for some time, and had a number of different possibilities lined up. I had a slightly half-hearted attempt at Python some time ago, and I've also considered the merits of Ruby, but in the end I settled for Perl. There are pros and cons with all languages, of course (I have no doubt that someone will argue vociferously that I made the wrong choice), but Perl seems to have the benefit of being very widely used (indeed, this very post is managed by a sophisticated collection of Perl scripts), and there's a lot of documentation and support available, in the guise of Perl Monks and Perl Mongers.

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