when it comes to banging shit out, when you need more juice than bash, perl was capable of some crazy shit. I found it really frustrating trying to learn real programming because I was taught perl extremely thoroughly and for most other languages programming exercises you have to get 3/4ths of the way through the book before you’re beyomd what perl can do in a couple of lines.
I eventually learned proper oo programming and compiler languages but there were a few years in the late 90’s and the CGI-BIN days where a solid grasp of perl made you feel like a real hacker-ma’am.
As an example I give you the ‘flip flop operator’, (no idea if perl was the first language to incorporate this, but i saw it there first) which would allow you to parse any data stream, and execute a code block on every line in the data stream between two matching regexes. Absolutely invaluable for screen scraping and would let you hit a URL and extract just the data you needed with about 4 lines of code total, including the library call for the get!
when it comes to banging shit out, when you need more juice than bash, perl was capable of some crazy shit. I found it really frustrating trying to learn real programming because I was taught perl extremely thoroughly and for most other languages programming exercises you have to get 3/4ths of the way through the book before you’re beyomd what perl can do in a couple of lines.
I eventually learned proper oo programming and compiler languages but there were a few years in the late 90’s and the CGI-BIN days where a solid grasp of perl made you feel like a real hacker-ma’am.
As an example I give you the ‘flip flop operator’, (no idea if perl was the first language to incorporate this, but i saw it there first) which would allow you to parse any data stream, and execute a code block on every line in the data stream between two matching regexes. Absolutely invaluable for screen scraping and would let you hit a URL and extract just the data you needed with about 4 lines of code total, including the library call for the get!