“One of the criticisms often leveled against Perl is that
it’s too big and too complicated for people who haven’t programmed
before. Simon Cozens disagrees. He teaches Perl to first-time
programmers, and says, “Perl is an ideal first programming
language.“
“Cozens is a linguist who has taught both formal and informal
classes in Perl to people with a range of programming experience.
He found that beginning programmers took quickly to Perl because
“it allows you to express yourself naturally.” For instance, the
automatic conversion between string and numeric types is what
non-programmers expect: the string “3” doesn’t mean 51; it means 3.
And if you add “4” to it, you expect to get “7” back….”
“Even things like regular expressions work well for beginners,
says Cozens. “They’re wonderful because people don’t think of text
or data in character-by-character terms. They see the whole lot at
once, and they look for patterns in the string; that’s the way the
brain operates. Regular expressions work the way people do; you
quite naturally say things like, ‘I want to find these characters,
but only at the beginning of the string,’ or ‘Find three numbers, a
space, and three letters,’ and these translate very easily into
regular expressions.”