From C# To Perl: Introduction

After over three years as a C# developer I have made the jump to Perl. Judging from the dearth of information I have found comparing the two (all I could find is this awful auto-generated comparison), I don’t think this is a jump many programmers have made, so I wanted to make some comparisons myself. In future posts I will be touching on differences (there aren’t many similarities) between the two languages and the advantages and disadvantages of each. In addition I will compare the surrounding issues of culture, tooling, performance, debugging, etc. The focus will be on the C# developer coming to Perl.

Since my Perl-fu is still weak, feel free to point out any inaccuracies you see. To be fair to Perl, when comparing many language features I will be comparing C# against both bare Perl and Perl with CPAN. The malleability of Perl compared to C# makes this necessary. In addition there are some features of each language that have no direct comparison to the other, such as tied variables in Perl (I just sat here for ten minutes trying to think of some feature of C# that isn’t available in some form on CPAN. I couldn’t think of any. Point Perl.).