Re: Something to meditate on -- the need for a trendy perl?

[Laurent_R]

choroba said: The only problem might be the person. I know several people whose opinion, once they make their mind, cannot be changed by any means. Short e-mail, long e-mail, arguments, reasoning, fist fight, no way. I wish you Alexander were different.

I am afraid you are right. I was definitely convinced by Linda's well-thought arguments, but, then, of course, there was no real need to convince me. Especially being a person who used Python for 2 or 3 years before switching to Perl about 10 years ago. Well, I keep telling 10 years, it is probably 11 years by now, as it was during the first quarter of 2003, if I remember the dates correctly (just checked the dates on my CV, yes, it was indeed in the early months of 2003). Even though I still think that Python is a nice language and certainly don't want to disparage it, I think someone trying to convince me to revert to Python would really have hard time.

I simply love Perl too much to be able to claim that I may be rational about that. And that's what I wanted to say: when it comes to programming language wars (or, say, language debates), most people are not or cannot be rational. I am not even sure that being rational about such topics really makes sense. After all, very often, the best language is often the one that you know the best.

Just as with spoken languages: if I want to express some very subtle idea or complicated personal feeling, I would probably prefer to use my mother tongue, French, because it is the one that I know best, but that does not prevent me to argue in English on this forum (and others), after all I passed a master degree in an American University: I certainly make some silly syntax mistakes, but I can (hopefully) express clearly what I want to express.

It is the same with programming languages: Perl has become what is closest to a native language for me, the language where I can be the most efficient, but I also have to use regularly half a dozen other languages (because I have to use a proprietary language for some applications, because C can be faster for some problems where speed matters, because I have to modify an existing application and cannot rewrite everything in another language, because the client wants PL/SQL scripts and does not want to hear about Perl Oracle modules, etc.). Although this is getting somewhat unlikely (I fell in love with Perl, I've never had a similar experience with another language), I might one day switch to another language, perhaps Ruby, Scala, Haskell or possibly some other new language that I might not even know about as of now. Very unlikely, though, that I would go back to Python or (even more unlikely) to the other dynamic language I used before Python, TCL. Perl is just better. Just as I would most probably not go back to Basic, Pascal, Fortran, ADA, Modula-2, Prolog and other languages I practiced in the past. In theory, I would also wish to avoid C, C++ and Java, but I know it is slightly more complicated, because they are dominant for some applications, especially as far as C is concerned.