People who want a quick job or improve their chances of employment, living a better life or some such thing will wish this question to be answered.
Like everything else in life this answer is highly subjective and every opinion is right or wrong depending on who is reading it. I will add to the confusion in my own way. My love affair with perl goes far beyond the job requirements. It has got to do with my love for the open source UNIX phenomenon. I used to read about Larry Wall, how much the world was welcoming perl and so on. Javascript happened because of my biz need. And python was learnt by and by. Even today I am not very good at it. Perl was also very useful in my career. So much so that it actually caused my boss to be annoyed by my speed and grasp of perl. And also my boss's boss. By the way as an aside, death stalks us every minute. When we die we cannot carry all our wealth and enjoyments to our next life but we surely can carry our knowledge. By that I mean not directly the syntax or programming language mastery but knowledge which is the ability to learn and retain information and process it in a certain way. Now back to the topic. Python cannot do what perl can. And you can argue similarly with other languages also. Every language has its place in the scheme of things. But if you are looking at learning programming or obtaining long term employable skill then all these languages are good. Javascript cannot be learnt without html, xml, css and CGI knowledge. And CGI cannot be written in javascript. ;) For CGI you have to learn perl anyway. Our irctc website for train ticket bookings is written in simple CGI. I am not sure what language. But it does not use any fancy web framework like Mason or Catalyst. Anyway I digress. Perl is used for mostly UNIX centric work. Somehow it nicely weaved into my life. I write the most critical bits for my hacking in C. Rest all in perl. I also earn my bread in perl these days by executing projects for a UK client. I recently wrote a program to convert audio podcast to video with a static image. I used perl and UNIX commands like ffmpeg and a python code to use the youtube upload API. But I did not write a single line of python. The python program was used like a UNIX shell utility. Javascript is very useful for animation purposes and for developing cross browser,cross OS network accessible user interfaces. Today web application development is a very useful skill. Having jQuery and PHP skill seems to have a certain demand. Can you write a daemon , a UNIX server background process in perl? Yes you can. I use it in production. It is slower than C and less capable in certain ways, more easy in certain ways. But Javascript is useful only within a browser environment. How many of you installed spidermonkey and started hacking javascript? After all I send you a jQuery code sample each day no? -Girish -- Gayatri Hitech http://gayatri-hitech.com _______________________________________________ ILUGC Mailing List: http://www.ae.iitm.ac.in/mailman/listinfo/ilugc ILUGC Mailing List Guidelines: http://ilugc.in/mailinglist-guidelines
