Dragonchild's points 5 and 6 rather remind me of the following quote, from
Epictetus's Handbook.
22. If you have an earnest desire of attaining to philosophy, prepare yourself from the very first to be laughed at, to be sneered by the multitude, to hear them say,." He is returned to us a philosopher all at once," and " Whence this supercilious look?" Now, for your part, don't have a supercilious look indeed; but keep steadily to those things which appear best to you as one appointed by God to this station. For remember that, if you adhere to the same point, those very persons who at first ridiculed will afterwards admire you. But if you are conquered by them, you will incur a double ridicule.
It seems to me quite true also - other programmers unfamiliar with Perl don't seem to quite understand how anything happens so easily and so well. I have used Perl in all sorts of environments - in the position of coder, but also interning in a VC and in a leasing company - just to get mundane tasks done easier. Currently, I'm doing some freelance work for this cruise company that needs to accomplish these really simple tasks but can't seem to be able to do so in their current environment. The management constantly thinks its totally amazing, the things that are getting done - and I think some of the full-time programmers feel a bit threatened. I think the thing here is that these tasks mostly have to do with either client-server stuff or reformatting output from other programs, the kinds of things that Perl does really easily but that in some other languages can be really tedious. :-)
Perly best,
-Adam
