Re: Seeker Of Perl Sympathy

[dws]

in reply to Seeker Of Perl Sympathy

I'd appreciate ... just explaining what the mind-set is of these people who seem not just to dislike Perl but to actively hate it.

One of the dark sides of being human is that if you get a sufficiently large group of us together, there will often be a designated object of scorn, for reasons real or imagined, but more often imagined. It seems to help a lot of people and a lot of groups to have an enemy. Lacking a real one, an imaginary enemy will get invented.

Applied to Perl, I think it works like this: Programmers who are anxious about their own abilities need to have something to point to which they aren't. For some, it's Visual Basic (as in "Well, I'm not a Visual Basic programmer. Oh yucky poo!"). For many others, the object of scorn is Perl, and not without some good reason. There's a lot of crap Perl out there, and many people have never gotten past the crap. And there's not a lot written about large systems in Perl. Given this, Perl makes an easy target.

[bradcathey]

Agreed dws. And any tool, misused, opens itself to criticism. Hammers are useful tools, but if you are using it to pound in screws, you are misusing it. But it's not the tool that's at fault, but the person using the tool.

I started programming back in the early 80's with BASIC. I felt like a junior grade programmer (which I probably was), but I started compiling it and in the late 80's wrote some commerical apps that I sold about 5000 of. Amazingly, people were using those up until Y2K. So, it may not have been the coolest hammer to use, but I used it as correctly as you could and it helped some folks in the meantime.