Re: perl : focus or balance

[FoxtrotUniform]

For me: balance, no question.

Perl's a wonderful language until you run into one of its limitations, or a production environment that doesn't have Perl (and won't anytime soon, unless the sysadmin gets hit by a truck), or co-workers who don't know the language and can't get up to speed in time to meet a deadline, or any number of other contingencies. It's nice to have a backup plan.

That said, my language experience is mostly confined to two languages, Perl and C/C++. (I include C++ because the C++ I write looks a lot like "C with classes".) In both cases, I'm quite comfortable with using the language, but not necessarily with hacking it. (I can decipher most obfus, and answer most of my co-workers' Perl questions, but I know nearly nothing about perlguts, for instance.) I'm planning to add Common LISP, or maybe Scheme, to that list in the near future, because I'm starting to feel like I've run out of tricks.

In addition to the two languages that I'm comfortable coding in, I also know bits and pieces of many others (Haskell and Prolog being the most interesting), which occasionally gives me an edge when I'm presented with a problem that fits one of them perfectly. (That happens most often with SQL.)

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F o x t r o t U n i f o r m

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[bcole23]

My take is that you have to Specialize in programming. If you understand technology and programming then learning perl or any other programming language is just learning the different implementations of the same things. Then learning the particular quirks. I've seen some who are experts in one or two things and that's well and good. However, I've also known the people who really "know" programming and they can do multiple languages at "expert" level. So I say, be an expert programmer and specialize in languages. Me personally, I'm an Oracle DBA, webmaster, 3d artist, perl programmer, unix admin, MCSE, etc etc etc. If you build your computing foundation from the ground up, learning new technologies is easy. It's just different implementations of existing technologies and every once in a while you get a brand new technology, but it's still going to be based on your preexisting knowledge. This disjointed poorly formed response brought to you by me.