Learning Perl

I'm learning Perl right now and I gotta say, there's something awesome about Perl. I've meaning to learn it for a long time and now that I am, it is awesome. I have read how Perl is one huge hack and I agree. (Now I'm entering into a rant mode where I explain its awesomeness with code. Personally, when I read others, it's interesting but doesn't really apply to me. So this post is just dedicated for me and all those guys who always disagree)

They say Perl is made by a linguist. I can see why. Look at Perl vs Python. In Python, when you want to multiply strings and letters, it goes like this:

print "fred" * 3

Amazingly, in Perl it's an error and returns 0.

print $fred x 3

Yes, you need a x and not *.

Talking about variables, Python vs Perl

print "I ate a %s" % steak

print "I ate a $steak"

The fact that you need to use "" and not '' to invoke variables in strings is awesome and somehow semantically clean.

Calling functions is also really neat. I like the fact that you don't need to use () for most. I also like how you declare them - arguments aren't declared in the function like Python:

def fark(you): # really annoying compared to sub fark { my fark }

I'm not done with Perl yet but I'm really enjoying it so far. Of course, I'm not a veteran yet so I won't understand all those nightmares of hacked Perl. Until then ~ pandaox