Re: Fearing the demise of Perl

[blue_cowdawg]

I might consider switching to another language if this trend persists.

That's like saying that if more and more people are eating fecal matter that it's a good idea to give up on steak and eat fecal matter along with the rest of the crowd.

Sorry, my dogs and I herd sheep. We ain't sheep.

I have always been a proponent of using the right tool to do a job. When I find a better tool to do a particular job then I adopt that tool in my rather complete tool bag. I don't throw the old tools away just because I have a new tool. For instance, I buy a router I don't throw my power screwdriver away since the router makes a very poor screwdriver. OTOH putting a coving bit in my power screwdriver won't help me much rounding off edges of boards.

In my practice as a Unix Professional I use a variety of tools. I use Open Source tools as much as I can to hold down the line on costs since at my level being cost concious is part of the profession. I use off the shelf products (in other words commercial) where the situation warrants it. That doesn't mean that if a client that I support buys Sun's web server that I'm going back to the rest of my clients and telling them to ditch Apache. The requirements and political sensitivity of the client buying Sun's product may be such that they cannot go Open Source. (yeah.. it happens..)

Tools that I use personally range from running Linux on my company owned laptop to Lotus Notes running under Wine to emacs as my preforred editor to running Visio® under cxoffice (a version of Wine) and on it goes. I program in a plethora of languages ranging from Perl and Bash to C, C++ and yes even Java. I've even been known to dabble in PHP and python on occasion.

A well rounded programmer IMHO should be able to program in any language a job requirement asks them to. It is only a matter of learning a new syntax. Programming is programming, the algorithms stay the same regardless of the language you are programming it. Why are there so many languages?

Every language brings to the programming world its own strengths and weaknesses, advantages and disadvantages. I would be hard pressed to figure out a way to write an operating system in pure Perl for an embedded system but OTOH doing associative arrays while not impossible are a bitch in assembler.