Re: Let's face it, Perl *is* a scripting language

[aufflick]

Unless the person who poses a question like that to me is a good friend and I'm in the mood for an argument, I try to defuse the situation without backing down on what I do.

I'd say something like "why not? it's Turing complete - why would it be less suitable for writing systems in because it employs just in time compilation instead of static compilation?".

Especially if theis person is a C programmer he's not going to have any arguments about the potential for obfuscation ;)

[toma]

You can also defuse the situation by offering to increase the stakes, and letting the other party back down. "Let's both solve the same programming problem, and see who gets done faster. Would $500 be an interesting wager? Of course, I might use a different language if I think it would be better for the task at hand, but I win most of my competitions with Perl."

This approach does leave an impression. Make it clear that CPAN is part of Perl, and don't challenge anyone who knows Haskell.

[aufflick]

:) Your comment reminds me of the comment by David Heinemeier Hansson (the creator of Rails) who once posed a similar challenge at during a conference presentation, with a similar caveat. It went something like

I challenge anyone to build an interactive web app faster than I can build it in Rails. Anyone except Avi.

Avi being Avi Bryant, author of Seaside - the insanely cool Smalltalk web framework.