Re: Why I learn a language.

[adrianh]

What made YOU learn Perl? Was it an accident of work/project. Was it a conscious, planned decision, if so, what influenced it?

I originally learned perl back in 1996. I was writing an e-commerce system (not W3 based) and needed to create a mock server to test the client with (client was C code). From a look at the FAQs and the old pink camel book it looked like I could prototype something quicker in perl than I could in C - so I learnt it :-)

In the end the server got implemented completely in perl. Stayed perl for several years until it got a rewrite into C (or C++, can't remember) - mainly because the dev team at the time were all C/C++ coders.

When you code, do you attempt to achieve the objective as efficiently as possible (time-wise, etc). Or do you focus on the elegance (or "correctness") of your code.

I'm one of those annoying people who think it's a false dichotomy. I aim to write good code in a timely manner. If I can't I'm doing something wrong ;-)