perl and again,

Ever since Ian Clarke mentioned the potential delights of python to me

whilst passing me in a corridor back in 1999 I've been tinkering around with

that language.

Christ, that's almost 10 years. I like python, it gave a great sense of

freedom after spending a heavy five years working with various flavours of

FORTRAN, from

FORTRAN 90, through to High Performance Fortran. Well, now here I am

tackling perl. It's a gem of a language, but by christ it's scary. The power

that it gives you

in it's ability to interpret so freely is also it's danger.

From the end of the introductory chapter from Programming Perl we have:

"But in the end, you must create you own view of Perl. It's your privilege

as an artist to inflict the pain of creativity on yourself. We can teach you

how we paint, but we can't teach you how your paint. There's More Than One

Way To Do It. Have the appropriate amount of fun."

For writing code at the speed of thought I can see how this is going to be a

beguilling language, however for large structured projects it worries me

that this language is going to slip out and away from the instantly

comprehensible. Perlhaps that's not the case, I guess I'll just have to find

out.

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