[Techtalk] On Perl

[Kai MacTane]

At 7/27/02 08:11 PM , gab wrote:
>On Fri, 2002-07-26 at 19:44, jennyw wrote:
> > Of course, one of Perl's mottos is "there's more than one way to do it".
>[snip]
>This drove/drives me crazy and was a huge obstacle in my initial
>learning of the language.  The last time I wrote a program before I
>picked up perl was <mumble> years ago and it was in _fortran_.  It took
>me a few months to get a grip on writing things in perl.

See, one of the things I like most about Perl is the fact that There's More 
Than One Way To Do It (TMTOWTDI) -- and more than that, there's its whole 
orientation toward context, and the fact that... well, Perl is a 
programming language that doesn't mind slang. You can cut corners, and take 
the hypotenuse or the diagonal, instead of having to go just up-down and 
left-right. (Maybe what I like about it is that Larry Wall and I both 
studied linguistics in college, rather than CS -- many of the things I seem 
to like about Perl are things that I think are very noticeably shaped his 
experience as a linguist; they're the sorts of things I think only a 
linguist would think to put into a programming language.)

I have come to accept that lots of people have trouble with the TMTOWTDI 
aspects of Perl, but I don't really "get" that. Can someone explain it to 
me? How is having multiple options difficult, or annoying, or 
uncomfortable, or whatever? Heck, I obviously can't even see what it is 
about the multiple options that's unwanted!

So, if someone can explain it to me, I'd be appreciative. (Of course, I may 
just not be *able* to understand it...)

                                                 --Kai MacTane
----------------------------------------------------------------------
"Playing dead and sweet submission,
  Cracks the whip deadpan on cue."
                                                 --Siouxsie and the
                                                   Banshees,
                                                  "Peek-a-boo"