Re: Learn Perl

[radiantmatrix]

perl is good, but it is outdated.

One could argue that C is "outdated" as well, since it's much older than Perl. Yet both languages have a huge footprint in existing projects, and are commonly selected to start new projects. In general, it's best to avoid "outdated" comments about any language -- you should only care whether a language is currently in use, and Perl is most definitely currently in use.

PHP, Java and .NET are more developed

I don't know what "more developed" means. I've done development in PHP, Java, and C#.NET -- they're fine languages. However, none of them have the library of pre-existing solutions to common problems that is Perl's CPAN.

You should never just learn one language anyhow. Perl is a great place to start, and it will be useful to you for a long time to come. But once you've achieved proficiency with Perl, you should learn other languages as well (don't worry, your second language is always easier to learn than your first).

Ignore the holy wars and the "my language is better than yours" pieces of "advice". Perl is a fine choice of programming language. So is Java. So is PHP. So is Python.