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What Was Your First Programming Language?
07-08-2015, 09:59 PM
Post: #84
RE: What Was Your First Programming Language?
(07-08-2015 04:11 PM)emece67 Wrote:  (& I hate Perl)

Personally, I hate Pascal. I implemented a market research survey cross-tabulation program in it, back in 1982, and it nearly drove me insane, so damned awkward was it for handling sane input processing and validation. I subsequently had people point out extensions that made this easier in Turbo Pascal - but that implementation had so many extensions, most of them contrary to the original strict and minimalist spirit of the language, that it really shouldn't have been called Pascal at all..

Perl is at the opposite extreme. I built a retail POS and perpetual inventory system in Perl, with MySQL as the database, and it went together really smoothly. The client loves it and is still using it, with no modifications, 15 years on. Which is just as well, because when I look at the code - especially the regexes - I wonder what on earth it does.

These days, Python has pretty much supplanted Perl, at least in my own work. It's the language of choice in the machine learning world, and the addition of Numpy and Scipy make it a strong contender for a lot of scientific/engineering work these days. When my calculators run out of steam, it's Python that I turn to, these days.

--- Les
[http://www.lesbell.com.au]
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RE: What Was Your First Programming Language? - Les Bell - 07-08-2015 09:59 PM



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