On Tue, Nov 30, 2010 at 5:36 PM, Chris Dolan <ch...@chrisdolan.net> wrote:
> On Nov 29, 2010, at 6:52 PM, Bill Ward wrote: > > What hurts me is that Perl has fallen out of favor so much ... I'm >> contemplating jumping ship myself, and moving to Ruby or Python, not because >> of anything intrinsic to the language but just because Perl is going the way >> of Cobol or Fortran. >> > > In the early stages of my last big Perl project, a sysadmin happened to > mention to the non-technical project lead that Perl is a dead language. > While that clearly was (and is) a falsehood, it nearly killed the project. > To me, the mere *perception* that Perl is a troubled platform hurts the > most. > Yeah, whenever I tell people I write Perl I often get the response "people still use that?" The funny thing, though, is that I've never worked in a language that hasn't > been maligned by my peers or customers at some point. Perl, C, C++, csh, > Java, Actionscript, Python, Lisp, PHP, VB, Javascript, etc -- it always > seems like there's someone in a position of authority who wants to > trash-talk the technology. Why is that? > Programming languages are like religions. People invest so much time in a language they feel that it is inherently superior to the alternatives. The reality is, any of us can pick up a new language in a few weeks if we work full-time at it.
