in reply to Jumping ship from C++
To be fair, you typically pick-up a copy of C++ and use it for very different purposes than you might choose to use Perl. It’s a pure-compiled language, for one thing, thus extremely optimized and so-forth. But, now that computers are so damm fast and capacious, it doesn’t matter nearly so much as it once did. You literally have horsepower to burn, whereas the true most-serious costs of a project remain the same as ever they were: labor costs! The “80/20 rule” applies strongly to matters of execution-speed efficiency, such that they can be greased by “XS,” whereas 100% of the source-code to any system must be expensively and continuously maintained.
If you’ve ever taken a brave peek into perlguts, you’ll see that you have instant access to some mighty-serious C-programming voodoo, just by deciding to use ths powerful and well-implemented language. But the real power of Perl, I think, comes straight from CPAN: 99501 Uploads, 28958 Distributions, 128843 Modules, 11158 Uploaders as of today. All Most of this being stuff that you don’t have to write/debug in order to get-done what you need to do. And, that’s huge. In short, it is both possible, practical, and compelling to work at a much higher level than C/C++ is designed to do, a great deal of the time.
That being said ... don’t throw away your C/C++ knowledge because from time to time you will use it, and you will know when that time has come. You will never actually “jump” ship. Instead, you’ll learn about the variety of ships that are afloat in the same seas, when to select and board each one, and when to tie them together.