Perl is like using a hand saw
I love Perl. I really do. But it's been six years since I used it with any frequency, and re-learning it is a pain in the ... well, it's a pain.
I spent the better part of today writing a Perl program with the simple task (ha) of taking a raw text file of the Bible and converting it into something that iBible can use.
It's like re-learning a language that is somewhat familiar but not.
Anyway, I finally got it to work after nearly destroying my computer with a fist.
Core Data: Jeesh!
Working on iBible 3, and I'm using a framework from Apple called Core Data. Long story short, it makes the handling of data in an application a lot smoother and simpler, but the learning curve is high.
Since I started programming (back with BASIC, then Perl. Get off my lawn, you!) reading data from disk and writing it back to disk used some sort of hand-coded I/O, meaning I had to write code to open a file, read the contents of the file, parse the contents and then stash it away somewhere where the program could use it (and the inverse process to save data to a file).
Core Data basically handles the heavy lifting of that stuff so I can concentrate on the rest of the program. That's good and bad. It's good because I would much rather concentrate on the rest of the program. It's bad because I have to learn how to use Core Data and all of the tutorials on the Internet are CRAP!
There. I said it.
I'm thinking that, as I learn Core Data, I'm going to post about it here, breaking down the jargon (oh, is it ever loaded with jargon) and explaining it so a person can scale the wall of the castle of Core Data without having to learn magic and fly over.