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Finally, allow us to return once more to the concept of Perl as a
natural language. Speakers of a natural language are allowed to have
differing skill levels, to speak different subsets of the language, to
learn as they go, and generally, to put the language to good use before
they know the whole language. You don't know all of Perl yet, just as
you don't know all of English. But that's Officially Okay in Perl
culture. You can work with Perl usefully, even though we haven't even told
you how to write your own subroutines yet. We've scarcely begun to
explain how to view Perl as a system management language, or a rapid
prototyping language, or a networking language, or an object-oriented
language. We could write chapters about some of these things. (Come to
think of it, we already did.)
But in the end, you must create your own view of Perl. It's
your privilege as an artist to inflict the pain of creativity on
yourself. We can teach you how we paint, but we
can't teach you how you paint. There's More Than
One Way To Do It.
Have the appropriate amount of fun.
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