Science/Engineering/Technical forums

Afternoon,

Thank you for allowing me to join the site! I'm 23 years of age.In my professional life I've worked as a former network security engineer for a distributor, field systems engineer for a bank, and a systems engineer for a cloud/virtualization provider. Personally i'm YAN (yet another nerd). Hobbies include perl, javascript/node.js, html5, php, linux, network security, etc while other interests include living off the grid, self sustaining homes and renewable energy. Above all else i am a father & husband and tend to find the work/life balance challenging at times because technology is my passion!

Ah, another perl guy...cool. Did you know you can actually write clear, readable code in that language? I think I manage OK. One simply has to remember that one might have to go back and change something and understand what they're doing. A few times of being bitten by cryptic code or inadequate comments will change the way you do things for certain. After all, the butt you save might be your own!

Welcome aboard!

Doug,

It's my favorite language by far...i'm partly biased about perl because it was also one of the first languages i ever learned. Did you also know that whatever script you write can be condensed to about half the amount of code? That's when it gets to be cryptic! Perl is like poetry to me, i find it elegant! I always thought a great coder is determined by how much they could do in the least amount of lines possible but i quickly learned that's not the case when you take maintenance into consideration!

Only half? I must be slacking. But I only enjoy watching "perl golf", I don't play. I concentrate more on being clear and re-usable. Since I also have spoken C since forever, I can code perl without thinking - you can do C in perl, kind of, it's just easier. And if you really have to crunch numbers, it can call out to a C shared lib anyway. Larry Wall did a good job there, and since he also wrote the runtime, there are no compromises like with Java or .NET - it's fast.

And then there's the CPAN. Nearly everything you could ever want is already there, and with a short learning curve and decent documentation. Learning MFC for windows (I stopped before that crummy .NET junk) was a real pain, but it was nice after that. Sadly, CPAN haven't yet updated Gladexml.pm yet to take output from any glade newer than 3.6 yet, so I can't do guis for perl in glade unless I run an older linux (in this case Ubuntu 10.04) in a virtual machine and use an old glade. Too bad, it was almost as good as dev studio for windows, which no longer lives here...I'm 100% linux on campus, barring the odd VB machine I never even run.

I might look into updating that pm myself, it's too good to lose access to easy GUI's in perl. It's just that I despise XML, and that's what changed.

My perl programs to do say, 4d plotting, are already a fat factor fewer lines than they would have been in C or C++...it's good enough.
Leaves more room for meaningfull comments. Other interpreted languages don't give me enough control over when garbage collection happens, so I can't use them for anything real time, which is about all I do anyway.