Jon,
I feel your pain. Personally, I have worked with many, many programmers both in the
USA and in
Europe and have discovered something very interesting: if someone is critical of
Perl, he or she
doesn't know the language well. It may be that people who get into Perl and don't
like it don't
bother to learn it well, or it may be that people who don't 'get' it don't learn it
well, so my
observation is merely a correlation: it proves nothing.
That being said, I do think it suggests that there are a lot of people out there who
buy into a
lot of the 'stuff' that's said about Perl without bothering to learn much about it (in
this sense,
it's akin to politics, religion, et al.) In short: I doubt you'll change their
minds, but I
don't think it's impossible.
> language - the understanding of more advanced data structures...with 2
> years of serious cobol for example should bring familiarity with files,
HAHAHAHAHAHA!!! I couldn't stop laughing when I read that one. "Serious COBOL"?
Gimme a break.
As an ex-mainframe programmer, I can tell you that whoever wrote that to you is
smoking crack.
Even Grace Hopper admitted that had she realized that COBOL would stick around as a
permanent
language that she would not have made some of the design decisions that went into it.
COBOL is a primitive language. I mean *primitive*. All variables are global. Data
manipulation
is a joke and the file systems that COBOL typically works with on mainframes are often
so
radically different from what we work with today that it's like comparing cheese and
Wednesday.
Did you know that most COBOL programmers can look at a file, see that it's exactly 133
character
fixed-width records and know that it's a report (I won't go into the why of it)? I
think many
programmers today would scratch their heads over that one. The way COBOL does things
is so
archaic and out-of-date that this suggestion is ludicrous.
> Can someone please help me explain to these people that writing Perl for 2
> years says about as much of my ability to program and understand "advanced
> data structures" and having worked on "more complex problems" as spending
> those 2 years with C.
Perhaps you can show them that Perl is an enterprise-class programming language and
not just a
scripting language:
1. Perl runs Sweden's pension system:
http://perl.oreilly.com/news/swedishpension_0601.html
2. Learning to Count on Perl at the Census Bureau:
http://perl.oreilly.com/news/census_0101.html
3. NBCi Accesses and Maintains Complex Databases with Perl:
http://perl.oreilly.com/news/nbci_1200.html
4. Burlington Coat Factory Putting Perl to All-Purpose Use:
http://perl.oreilly.com/news/burlington_0500.html
5. Perl And The Crystal Ball: Economic Forecasting At The "Fed":
http://perl.oreilly.com/news/battenberg_0199.html
6. Amazon's Production Software Group Builds Auction Site Prototype:
http://perl.oreilly.com/news/amazon_0100.html
Even if you can't win this fight, I'd go for it. No send backing down if you believe
you're
right.
Cheers,
Curtis Poe
=====
Senior Programmer
Onsite! Technology (http://www.onsitetech.com/)
"Ovid" on http://www.perlmonks.org/
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