Higher-Order Perl
One thing that I love about reading good programming books (maybe even good Perl programming books) is the humor instilled in them. Tonight I decided to start reading Higher Order Perl (which you can get free here!) Here is a selection from the frontispiece:
… Hardly anyone wants to listen to Lisp programmers. Perl folks have a deep suspicion of Lisp, as demonstrated by Larry Wall’s famous remark that Lisp has all the visual appeal of oatmeal with fingernail clippings mixed in. Lisp programmers go around making funny noises like ‘cons’ and ‘cooder,’ and they talk about things like the PC loser-ing problem, whatever that is. They believe that Lisp is better than other programming languages, and they say so, which is irritating. But now it is all okay, because now you do not have to listen to the Lisp folks. You can listen to me instead. I will make soothing noises about hashes and stashes and globs, and talk about the familiar and comforting soft reference and variable suicide problems. Instead of telling you how wonderful Lisp is, I will tell you how wonderful Perl is, and at the end you will not have to know any Lisp…
I am looking forward to reading this one :-)
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