[Gllug] C/C++ mentor

[Pete Ryland]

On 29/11/06, Aaron Trevena <aaron.trevena at gmail.com> wrote:
> You don't need to grok everything the language has to offer at all.
> I've been doing Perl professionally for both small and large projects,
> everything from quick cgi scripts and one liners, to CRM, Supply Chain
> Management and Aviation. No more than twice, since I was a newbie,
> have I come accross some Perl in my work that was outside of what I
> already I was familiar with, and I'm no Perl Guru, I've never needed
> to touch XS/SWIG, internals, B::, are more than 10% of the debugger.

This is possibly true within a given industry and country, but travel
a little bit and you'll find things done in completely different ways.
 The UK is definitely one for copying techniques off others.  Even
password choice seems to have a "standard" here. ;-)  [I really don't
want a show of hands here for the passwords gllugers use which just
use an obvious letter-to-number-or-punctuation translation of
something related like the business's location.  I've never seen this
pattern used outside the UK.]

Funnily enough, I have used both xs and swig for wrapping C code
(they're both very easy to use, and in fact swig uses xs) and done
some OO stuff in perl.  In fact, I think there's a lot of people on
this list that indeed use OO regularly in perl.

> In fact, it's well known that you only need to know a small subset to
> get a job done, that's why sysadmins use it, cgi newbies used it back

Yes, you only need a small subset to write something, but I was
talking about reading others' code.

> C++, Java and C#  all have a LOT more to learn, just compare a
> helloworld program at the start of any book on the subject, and don't
> get me started on the horrors in C++ like the STL. *shudder*.

In terms of syntax, they are all much smaller than perl.  Libraries
are another thing, and that's what references are for.  You certainly
don't want to be using a reference to understand the *syntax* of a
program.

And actually, verbosity of the helloworld program is a sure sign of a
simple syntax.  Take 'bf' for example.

Pete
-- 
Gllug mailing list  -  Gllug at gllug.org.uk
http://lists.gllug.org.uk/mailman/listinfo/gllug