From C# to Perl?

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fubak

Supreme [H]ardness
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Jul 13, 2001
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I'm a C# developer and I am moving into a position that will require me to learn Perl eventually. Has anyone made this transition before? If so, what would you recommend for reading or what paths should I take?
 
If you don't mind me asking, why would you do such a switch?
 
B/c the group I'm goin to work with develops in Perl. I'm hoping I can do some C# while there, but I want to learn Perl anyway. Google writes a ton of their stuff in it
 
It's important these days to make a distinction between 'raw' Perl and the way that it's written by modern developers. Out of the box, Perl 6 is a painful, cryptic language that's missing a lot of syntactic features that you'd expect from a modern programming language. Fortunately it has 'source filters' - essentially Perl programs that modify your code before compilation allowing you to change the syntax & feel of the language. I've been away from Perl for a few years but an example that comes to mind is Moose. The downside to this is that, until you get into their code, it's hard to really learn the Perl you're going to be writing.

Well written Modern Perl is a far cry from the line-noise/cat-walked-on-the-keyboard language it has the reputation for being. What's likely to be the biggest change, moving from something like C#, is going to be the feel of the community & the decentralized nature of the available libraries.

...and don't ponder the difference between lists and arrays too hard. It'll make your head hurt.
 
The funny thing about Perl is that the syntax alone can range between simple and elegant to the "cat-walked-over-the-keyboard" mess that a poster above mentioned, depending on how you choose to write your code.


Learning Perl shouldn't be difficult for a C# developer.
 
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