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  $point->missed
I know Perl far, far better than I know Ruby or Python. But I can't easily reach for the abstractions in those examples within Perl.

That said, I'm in agreement with your basic point. On the whole the scripting languages (including JavaScript) are much more similar than different.



I don't consider these as being particularly interesting differences. With the right modules, I can write code that looks like that in Perl. (It's not idiomatic, though, so it is worth exploring other languages to see which idioms you'd like to steal. I stole monads and applicative functors from Haskell for Perl in MooseX::Data, for example. Monadic control flow is not a common Perl idiom, but it is perfect for my asynchronous CPAN client.)

I am talking major differences, things that are so fundamental that you can't really steal. Looking at Haskell, I see things like lazy evaluation, purity, static typing and type inference, etc. Very, very different from Perl.

In Scheme, I see the "call stack" as a graph of frames, not as a linked-list as in C. This is quite radical.

But in Ruby and Python all I see are different built-in functions, some with special syntax. (Generators, list comprehensions, etc., etc.)

I know Perl far, far better than I know Ruby or Python. But I can't easily reach for the abstractions in those examples within Perl.

I can. I hope you are considering CPAN as part of Perl, because "core perl" is a very, very outdated and broken programming language. I think I would even prefer Java!




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