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Postings from May 2001
>>>>> "Dan" == Dan Sugalski <dan@sidhe.org> writes: Dan> People think they *must* know all the core bits of a language, and Dan> they think that consists of all the stuff we ship with perl. (And, Dan> let's face it, we ship a *lot* of stuff with perl) It's like you're Dan> not allowed to know only a part of a language anymore--that's somehow Dan> ungeeky or something. One of the things that I think made llama1 so successful and our ongoing llama course popular is that I deliberately chose a subset of Perl to teach that was reasonably self-consistent and yet covered 80% of people wanted to do with Perl in under 100 lines of code. And that's not an easy task. I thought long and hard about where to put array slices and alternate quoting operators. I had to think about how much new problem space a given feature opens for the number of paragraphs it would take to describe the feature. That's why you don't see heredocs in llama1. It's easy to describe for those familiar with the Unix shell, but if you're talking about a standalone tutorial, it takes a good page or two to really talk about the nuances. And the same problem space was covered fine by just letting a double-quoted string break over many lines. :) And that's why you still won't see heredocs in llama3. The point of the llama is to cover a subset that lets you implement most of what you need for most of the programs out there. In fact, Tom Phoenix and I killed "formats". Yeah, people use them, but the 10 pages for that were sorely needed to cover other things in more detail or more breadth. So, when Perl6 stabilizes a bit more, I'll be starting the same process for Perl6.... what's the "tiny language" buried within this large language? I bet I can still give you the "first 40 hours that everyone needs starting with Perl6" in a 250-page book, and it'll still cover 80% of what everyone needs for 80% of the programs. I bet about 75% will be the same semantics as llama3, with some syntax changes. -- Randal L. Schwartz - Stonehenge Consulting Services, Inc. - +1 503 777 0095 <merlyn@stonehenge.com> <URL:http://www.stonehenge.com/merlyn/> Perl/Unix/security consulting, Technical writing, Comedy, etc. etc. See PerlTraining.Stonehenge.com for onsite and open-enrollment Perl training!Thread Previous | Thread Next