I’m back to posting here after a long hiatus, mostly because I have something interesting to report. I’ve been avoiding/neglecting this site because I’ve been incredibly busy with schoolwork, but everything is getting more leisurely in a calm-before-the-finals sort of way.

Anyway, I have in front of me the thick (1k pages) 3rd edition of O’Reilly’s “Programming Perl”, graciously lent, because at some point, that’s what I hope to do. In preparation for this summer (more on that later) I hope to work my way at least partly through this tome, and in the process, hopefully post some reactions to the language as I go.

I guess I’d better be upfront about my prejudices and preconceptions: from what I’ve seen, I don’t think I’ll like Perl. I have a distaste for extraneous punctuation (eg, I try to leave parens and such off as much as I can when coding in Ruby, and I consider Ruby’s @variable an offense to the eye and sensibilities), and from what I’ve seen from Perl, it has plenty of extra $(%]&*# to annoy the hell out of me. I imagine I won’t like the lack of turtles-all-the-way-down OO that Ruby has, and I think the general lack of cohesiveness and cobbled-together inelegant TMTOWTDI messiness won’t sit with me well either. But hey, I’d love to be shown wrong — two favorite languages are better than one!

So, in general, expect some more activity at this place, and especially some more Perl posts.