Re: Perl, the new generation

At 11:58 AM 5/16/2001 -0400, Adam Turoff wrote:
>On Tue, May 15, 2001 at 03:41:15PM -0600, Nathan Torkington wrote:
> > Stephen P. Potter writes:
> > > When we moved from 4 to 5, so people thought we should continue
> > > developing 4 without all the "useless" new stuff, like OO and
> > > threads and etc.  I wonder more and more if they weren't right.  I
> > > wonder if as 6 develops if we shouldn't split off the old 4 syntax
> > > and have two languages.
> >
> > If you want to do it, do it.  I vomit at the thought of a language
> > without data structures or modules, though, and I wouldn't be
> > surprised if others did too.
>
>It's not so much that Perl shouldn't have data structures or modules.
>I think what Stephen is saying (and he's not the only one) is that
>the bare minimum amount of Perl you *must* know to be productive
>is increasing.  Either that, or we're giving the impression that
>it's increasing.  Many people don't want to get bogged down in how
>the details of Unicode, upperclass level CS topics or Perl's unique
>syntactical peculiarities to parse a damn log file (or find and
>use a CPAN module that does it).

I don't know if it's much reassurance to anyone, but I use quick-n-dirty 
perl a lot. Making it not go away is definitely not in the program.

I think we really, really need a perlquick.pod or something that just runs 
through the amount of perl you need to do simple filter & file processing 
tasks.

					Dan

--------------------------------------"it's like this"-------------------
Dan Sugalski                          even samurai
[email protected]                         have teddy bears and even
                                      teddy bears get drunk