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Postings from July 2011
Jesse Vincent wrote: > On Wed, Jul 20, 2011 at 10:10:27AM -0600, Karl Williamson wrote: > > I believe the 3-argument open should be the one stressed in a tutorial. > > +1 > > 2-arg open can be used correctly, but is easier to screw up. We don't > need to teach people all the ways to do it in an intro tutorial. We > need to teach them at least one good way to do it and to point them > toward the reference documentation that explains all the rope a given > feature provides and explains all the variant forms they might encounter > in the wild. If perlopentut were the only place we documented two-arg > open, we'd be in a lot of trouble. Thankfully, it's not. > > Perl's built in tutorial documentation should steer new users in a > reasonable direction and provide them with the tools they need to > write good Perl code. When a tutorial tries to be exhaustive, it ends > up exhausting and often fails at its primary goal. I learnt Perl’s open function from perlopentut. I did not find it at all exhausting, but engaging. I think it would be a pity to lose the gentle-introduction-style explanation of the advanced features, as it is still much easier to read than the reference documentation. Also, since there are clearly-defined sections, one can easily skip over some in the first reading. Also, everyone seems to have a different idea of what a tutorial is. As someone pointed out, maybe it’s the name that’s the problem. Or maybe we should go the route of perlre*: perlrequick - quick start perlretut - more comprehensive tutorial perlopenquick - quick start perlopentut - more comprehensive tutorial > Similarly, I don't think perlopentut.pod should cover one-arg open. > > On an almost-related note, I can foresee a future where a program running > in a lexical scope declared to be v5.30 (or whatever) doesn't have 2-arg > open available to it, but that's neither here nor there[1]. > > Best, > Jesse >Thread Previous | Thread Next