Anyone heard of the language Perl ?

[Tron]

My mom's friend helped build it, pretty new, but I don't think you guys have heard of it. I'm gonna give it a shot since i'm relatively new to programming. Anyways, it's at http://www.perl.com if anyone wanted to know.

[iago]

I learned it a couple years ago, and it's a pretty good language.  It has a lot of overhead, though, being an interpreted language, but it works well with CGI and web programming.  It's unfortunate that to use it you have to have it installed in on the server and you have to be able to chmod your .pl files, so many servers (especially free ones) don't support perl.

I do enjoy using it, though, but I would learning c++ first.  In case you're wondering, this is the order that I learned languages:
Basic, Visual Basic, Perl, C++, C, Java.  My favourites are C/C++, Java, Perl/Visual Basic.  

In my opinion, Perl/VB both have specific purposes but are limited too much to be terribly useful to me.

[j0k3r]

I found perl and php to be identical (although I haven't learned perl yet, I can read it fine and it seems to work the same as php) but php seems to be growing faster and taking perl's place.

Order I went in was:
HTML, VB, PHP, Turing, and currently working on C++. The easy languages are good to teach basics... But are also limitedely(sp?) useful.

[herzog_zwei]

Perl's not that new; it's been around since the late 80's.

Perl is, IMO, the best text processing language.  It's got the best regular expression parser around.  It's very good for writing up quick scripts.  It's very flexible and you can integrate it into other languages or vice versa.  The reason for Perl being slow is because it needs to parse and compile the script before it runs.  Think of it as more of a virtual machine than an interpreter.  If you do it properly, the overhead in compilation isn't that bad (look into mod_perl if you want fast Perl scripts for web servers).  There's also a Perl compiler for it as well.

PHP is a baby compared to Perl.  PHP is designed more for web based apps than anything else (though it can be used to do other things).  Perl is general purpose.  It takes more time to learn Perl well than PHP well.  PHP generally comes with everything already in it; Perl usually come with a certain amount of modules and you'd have to add in more to make it do more advanced stuff (unless you want to write those modules yourself).  Perl wasn't designed for web based apps, but it's better suited for it (more scalable) than PHP if you get the necessary modules.

The real problem with Perl is that as you get into more advanced stuff, things can become much more cryptic and it'll take time to decrypt what's going on so you can fix some bug if you haven't looked at it in a long time.  Also, Perl6 intends to break the old regular expression syntax so it can lead to headaches if you have to port it over from Perl5.  However, it should make the regex better than it currently is (which is impressive since it's already the best) (to give you an idea of how good it is, it can handle validation of say phone numbers in many different formats and return it in a normalized form in say 2 lines of code (or a few more lines to do it properly) while doing the same thing in something like C without a regular expression parser would takes tens of lines).

[Camel]

My mom's friend helped build it, pretty new, but I don't think you guys have heard of it. I'm gonna give it a shot since i'm relatively new to programming. Anyways, it's at http://www.perl.com if anyone wanted to know.

Uh, perl isn't new; it's been around forever.

And yes j0k3r, perl, php, c, and quite a few others are very similar. They are not, however, exactly the same.

[Tron]

Eh, my mom just said that so... lol. I learned HTML then Javascript, and now i'm trying to learn visual basic or possibly C++. I liked the whole built in compiler with perl though.

[j0k3r]

VB = waste of time dude, I can't even stand the site of it (however, I do find it VERY organized with functions and whatnot).

[Camel]

HTML isn't a programming language. It's a markup language. Javascript is only a half-language, as is vbscript (they're exactly the same aside from syntax) -- they are intended to extend programs, not write them. Perl is sort of an unspoken language; it's very powerful yet it isn't very presentable. It's excellent for doing back-end work such as CGI, but rarely used for standalone programs. I would love to see Visual Perl in Visual Studio 8.

[Tron]

Yeah me too, I got visual studio but i'm still learning the basics. Mine didn't come with the help tutorials though so it's kinda hard.

[timbo]

Perl is, IMO, the best text processing language.  It's got the best regular expression parser around.
...
The real problem with Perl is that as you get into more advanced stuff, things can become much more cryptic and it'll take time to decrypt what's going on so you can fix some bug if you haven't looked at it in a long time.

that is what it was designed for
...
yes, the shortcuts can make it difficult to read if one doesnt know them.

[Grok]

I would love to see Visual Perl in Visual Studio 8.

You mean 9.

I think 8 is "Microsoft Visual Studio .NET 2003".

[DarkMinion]

I need to get up to date, I only have VS 6

[Yoni]

VS 6 is pretty sufficient. I found most of the differences between 6 and 7 are cosmetic. (I am speaking as a person who doesn't use .NET.)

[K]

VS6 C++ ISO compliance: 85%
VS .NET: 90%
VS .NET 2003: 98%

apparently vs.net 2003 can finally completely build the blitz, boost, and loki libraries.  woo.

[Skywing]

I would love to see Visual Perl in Visual Studio 8.

You mean 9.

I think 8 is "Microsoft Visual Studio .NET 2003".

Microsoft Visual Studio .NET 2003 is 7.1, actually.