Merits of Perl

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hawkmp4

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I've been working in Python and C++ in my computer science class and I've been looking at learning another language just for kicks. What are the advantages of Perl over either of these languages? Will it be useful to me? (I'm an applied mathematics major, CS minor)
 
Yeah. For fun.
Well, I won't learn it if it isn't going to be of any use to me. I'm not THAT bored.
Yet.
 
hawkmp4 said:
I've been working in Python and C++ in my computer science class and I've been looking at learning another language just for kicks. What are the advantages of Perl over either of these languages?
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Over C++, it has the same advantages as Python (higher level, easier text manipulation, etc.). It's quite similar to Python, and which one is "better" is mostly personal preference. I prefer Perl but many others don't.

hawkmp4 said:
Will it be useful to me? (I'm an applied mathematics major, CS minor)
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Learning new languages is almost always useful, so yes. But it would certainly be *more* useful to learn a really different language, like Haskell or Lisp. They require learning a fundamentally different way of thinking about programming, not just a new syntax and some conventions.
 
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Every CS student should know a variety of languages. Combine that with the fact that you can't expect to be spoon fed every language in a class, you should be able to learn one on your own, and Perl is quite helpful. While most of the code I do at work is in C++, if I need to hack together some tool to help the development process, but isn't necessarily a shipped product, doing it in Perl is nice because then it just works on AIX and Linux.
 
I've heard good things about Lisp. I think I'll try my hand at that. Something different will be fun. Thanks for everyone's input.
 
I learned a bit of Common Lisp this summer...it's quite interesting. Also recommended is Lua, a very flexible yet simple language.
 
I've already worked with PHP. I'm not really that interested in web applications, and other than that it seems easier to use C++ or Python for that.
 
Sorry for the double post- I figure it's off topic so the post count doesn't matter.
Another related question- for numeric computations, FORTRAN or Lisp?
 
For numeric computations (linear alg, finite element analysis, vector calculus, etc.) few things can compete to MatLab. It's cheap for students, but not free.

The scientific python suite, SciPy (http://www.scipy.org/), does a pretty admirable job of replicating the functionality in FOSS.
 
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