Re: How bad it is to learn Perl?

[Albannach]

First off, to respond to you title, I have to say it's never a bad thing to learn Perl ;-)

But don't take that to mean that Perl is the be-all and end-all of languages. It is constantly being reinvented itself, so it obvously isn't perfect (yet). It is indeed fabulous and my language of choice (when I have a choice). You however seem to be arranging languages in a hierarchy of quality, and while this is a fairly natural response, I think you will soon realise that there is no one scale upon which to measure language quality.

I'd also like to suggest that you will have a hard time finding a language that doesn't offer you something new and beneficial, even if is just a new way at looking at other languages. As examples, consider all the oddball little languages people invent for fun (where fun is more often than not defined as intellectual curiosity). And don't forget that there are plenty of embedded systems and proprietary systems out there that have (almost) hopelessly inadequate languages, with which one can work wonders if one has sufficiently broad background.

So with each new language, you should explore, test, push the limits, and find out what is different from what you know, and some of that will inevitably be better than what you know. It has been said before, but I'll repeat it because it is right: being a good programmer will mean knowing not just how to use your tools, but how to choose the right ones for each job.

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I'd like to be able to assign to an luser