perl

i was directed to ask you guys, so sorry for the copy/paste:

i have a quick question for you:

i have the itch to write a program in PERL. my ultimate goal is this: i have the learning program daisy.exe, and i would like to create a way for daisy to passively access wikipedia and use the articles as input. that way, when i'm not talking to daisy, it can access wiki and get more knowledge about a greater variety of things. when i brought this up on /r9k/ a while back, people were generally disinterested. the only helpful suggestion was that i write a program in PERL that would get this done.

originally i thought that there was maybe an app or add-on or something that somebody had already written for it, and i could just install that and tweak it a bit. but, since i have to apparently write a program, how hard is it to write in PERL? i have zero experience with writing in anything, but as this is just a hobby, i have plenty of time to teach myself if it is worth it.

so /g/, how hard is PERL? given the description of what i want to do, is this remotely feasible?

Perl is very hard. Learning scheme would be easier and yield measurable results faster. The introductory text I recommend is named SICP, you can read it here: http://mitpress.mit.edu/sicp/

>>2
Is that even relevant to the conversation or is that just your way of saying ``Read SICP''?

>>2

is there a better suggestion that you might have for what i want to do?  the only reason i said 'perl' was because it was the only somewhat helpful input i've gotten on the subject. i'm willing to entertain any suggestions, because as i said before i'm a bit in over my head on this one, and looking to make this a sort of craft hobby.

>>4
>>2

sorry, i misread your post.  'scheme' is the name of the language i should learn?  also, is my idea practical at all?

How about yhbt
http://darcs.haskell.org/yhbt/yhbt.pdf

>>6
link is broken, couldn't view as pdf or html.

>>7
You couldn't because YHBT. HAND.

>>7
Ahaha.

Perl is not very difficult to just pick up and use.
But as you go deeper, it gets more and more complex.
For anything you'll want to do in C or SH, it's fine.
Anything you want to do in C++ or C#, it gets trickier. But it's still one of the best languages around.

>Some people, when confronted with a problem, think “I know, I'll use Perl.”
>Now they have two problems.

>>1
to answer your question :
as i do most of my programing in perl , i can tell you that most of the horrible things people say are right .
first of all the syntax is complex and fucked up , that you will forget what you wanted to write after 5 minutes because you will spend to much time trying to figure out how to implement even small things .
second , you will never ever be able to read it again and understand what it was about , heck you will not even be able to just read it because all the obscure characters in the code .
third , the interpreter will bombard you with cryptic error messages that will make you delete all your files and encrypt your own HDD .
forth , the resulting insanaty will give you sleepless nights , make screaming all the time and probably make you try a suicide , if you are lucky enough to still have any braincells after the code has run trough the interpreter .
even right now as i type this with one hand i make a rope with the other one . but maybe its just that i have not slept in 5 days .
well have fun coding and goodbye currel world .

>>11 has never written a line of perl in his life.

>>11
goodnight sweet prince

>>12
neither have I

>>12
I have written exactly one line of perl in my life

>>11
I have written a lot of lines in perl (expect 4chan abuser and more!), and you are so full of shit. Perl lets you write bad programs if you are a dumbass, which any language does (although it may be easier with perl). If you can't understand what you wrote 5 minutes ago (not literally, right), you are mentally retarded. Why am i even replying to you, is it too difficult to capitalize your sentences?

What this really means, though, is that you, >>1, should stick to perl. Yes, your task is trivial with perl, probably less than 100 lines of code.

Perl lets you write bad programs if you are a dumbass, which any language does (although it may be easier with perl).
perl also lets you write good programs, with a small amount of effort. the fact that you can't seems to indicate that you're used to one of those languages that doesn't let you write good programs.

Why am i even replying to you, is it too difficult to capitalize your sentences?
lol french faggot can't even get that faggy french capitalization shit right.

>>15
print "Hello World"; ?

>>18
Actually no, it was a one-liner to print out the time every second during the countdown to 1234567890 unix time. Fucked if I can remember what it is now, it's no longer in my bash history

>>19
Disregard that I suck cocks, it was
perl -e 'while(1){ print time() . "\n"; sleep 1}'

>>19,20
Which UNIX time GET party were you at?

>>17
Where are you drawing these conclusions about me from?

>>11,17,18
Perl lets you write as good or as bad a program as any other.
The point about Perl is that it lets you write this program any way you like. Functional, OO, Imperative, Declarative, etc.
"There's more than one way to do it" isn't a motto, it's a description for the multi-paradigm nature of Perl.

Thing is, because everything is so broad, it gets more confusing as you move on. Perl's learning curve starts off gently and then reaches a steep climb, until you've grokked it all. Then you get how logical and easy things are and it's smooth sailing.

Perl is as readable as you make it. The stereotype comes from using regular expressions as a first level operator. Regex isn't that hard, but yes, it does tend to be Write-Once-Read-Never at times. That, however, is not Perl; and trust me, once you start using regex, you won't understand how you lived without them.

C and its ilk are languages for programs.
Perl is a language for programmers.

Wait... A serious post? In my /prog/? Let the trolling commence.

>>23
Wait... A serious post? In my /prog/? Let the trolling commence.
IHBT.

Lain.