in reply to Perl: Survival of the Fittest
Hi there. I enjoyed reading the Perl vs. COBOL tutorial, but
I have to confess that it made me sad. I've worked in the
same company with COBOL programmers before, and they were
themselves dinosaurs. The company kept them around to wrangle
the old mainframes used for the financial management system.
They seemed to lead this joyless existence of concentration
on minutiae, to such an extent that it actually warped their
personalities (or maybe only already-warped people could stay in
such a job so long). They were nitpicky, bureaucratic-minded,
authoritarian, and devoid of creativity, just like the language
itself.
Aside from that tragedy, I am always saddened to see
a programmer who has stopped learning. Creatively, such a
person might as well be dead. As Larry Wall said, "Death
is bad. I reject death. I will stay way from trucks today."
In Section
Meditations