From: adam beecher (adam at domain iewebs.com)
Date: Wed 17 May 2000 - 10:54:28 IST
> > For CGI, the best place to start is probably Perl...
>
> Possibly the worst place. Perl has such a messed up syntax that if you
> learn Perl first, you'll never be able to program in a "normal" language
> like C or Python. (Of course, I could just be biased - I tried to learn
> perl, and gave up thinking "You shouldn't be allowed to do that").
>
Once again it's probably just a matter of personal opinion. I went HTML >
JavaScript > Perl, because I needed/wanted some interacivity for my site, and
found that modifying Perl scripts came quite easily. I'm not a programmer in the
real sense though, and I guess I've come at things bass-ackwards. And probably a
bit slower than if I'd done thing "properly", but that suits me just fine n'
dandy. And as I've said before, "learning by doing" is my preferred way of doing
things, and because of the huge amount of easily-findable Perl stuff on the web,
well, it's like pissing up a rope, innit? :)
As to the messed-up syntax, well, the Perl people have a comment ready for
everything don't they:
http://www.perl.com/pub/2000/01/10PerlMyths.html#Perl_looks_like_line_noise
> PHP is possibly the way to go - more websites use it than anything else
> these days. If you were brave, you could also checkout AOLserver, and see
> about that. It's a bit more learning than PHP/Apache, but it can be well
> worth it (It has TCL as it's scripting language, which is lovely for
> simple stuff, and supports PHP4 now too!).
>
Well, PHP is easy-peasy for a beginner who's willing to read the manual. It has
lots of readily-available functions that avoid creating your own, and the syntax
is (reputed to be) a sort of mish-mash of Perl and C, so it's a good step into
those languages. That said, it seems that if you wanted to recommend someone
learn programming "properly", PHP would be a bad route to go down, because it
makes things a little *too* easy.
As to AOLServer, I reckon I should have a go off it sometime, but the "bit more
learning" bit seems to defeat the purpose, for a beginner at least. It might be
better for someone just starting out to tinker with Apache first. It's fast,
well-documented, well-supported and easy to use. But you knew that didn't you?
:)
adam
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