Octavian, For what it's worth, I thought you've done very well with this crowd and that your first and subsequent posts on this topic was balanced and fair. But it seems this crowd was biased toward Perl, so even being fair is hard. A mailing list of users who use Perl and who read job boards directed at Perl developers...well, the general response is somewhat expected. ;-)
No doubt the OP realized this and is probably posting on other languages' mailing list, too... :-D On Thu, Jan 6, 2011 at 22:45, Octavian Rasnita <orasn...@gmail.com> wrote: > From: "Brandon McCaig" <bamcc...@gmail.com> > Unixes are far superior for *hosting* web applications indeed, but they are > not as good as Windows for using them as desktop apps, and a programmer is a > desktop user also so it is important if Perl doesn't have the same tools for > this OS like other languages. > I did say that I consider Perl the best for web programming already, but if > it is not the best language for Windows this doesn't mean that we shouldn't > say this. Yes -- as much we hate to admit, Windows does have a larger market share and while most people probably don't program, the ones that do probably use something else other than Perl. Some of the programmers might use cygwin + gcc, but I wouldn't be surprised if Microsoft Visual Studio is favored by companies and that they would use a language like C++, Java, etc. (though Perl is supported). >> I've never heard of Perl having a bad overall image. Quite the >> contrary. C is still a vastly popular language, but there are >> countless people and groups that will label it dead and obsolete. They >> wouldn't be talking about it if it didn't matter. :P Everybody is >> entitled to their opinion and everybody experiences life a little bit >> differently. I think that Perl is still a vastly popular language and >> I don't foresee that changing anytime soon. Like all software, it >> always comes down to "right tool for the job", and Perl is the right >> tool for a lot of jobs. Brandon -- Well, if C becomes dead and obsolete, then we have a problem -- isn't Perl implemented using C? :-) I use C more than Perl in my work and I definitely don't think it is obsolete. As Perl came after C, then one can argue that Perl aimed to improve on some aspects of C. But if this argument is true, then the fact that Python and Ruby came after Perl would make us wonder if they somehow improved on Perl? Then there's the upcoming Perl6... It's all a horse race between languages, with each language influencing the development of others... That's a win-win for all of us, even if you're just using Perl. >> More than likely, they prefer Python and/or Ruby either out of >> personal preference (we don't all think alike) or experience and for >> many because they haven't actually used Perl. The impression that I've >> gotten is that Perl is an intimidating language to many (it's similar >> to C in that respect). Brandon again (sorry, maybe should have written two replies) -- I was going to avoid this thread but while working today, I was reading another program's documentation and they gave a script to run their program in Python. That's when I realized that the recent program documentations I've seen make more references to Python than any other scripting language. I don't know why. As someone else observed about India, being in Japan, I think Ruby is mentioned / seen more often than I'm comfortable with (since I don't know Ruby :-) ). This obviously has to do with Ruby being developed in Japan. So, country does play a part. I think the language that is taught in universities also affects what fresh graduates will prefer when then enter a company. This is the basis of Microsoft's, etc. use of academic pricing...their hope that after graduation, people will continue using their software by paying full price. Guess it works... >> In any case, once you've learned one programming language it's >> generally much easier to learn others, so one shouldn't worry too much >> about which one to learn and just learn one. There is no one >> programming language that is best at everything. The OP's seeking >> answers that simply don't exist without well defined parameters. > > Well, my opinion is that this is not exactly true. Learning core Perl is not > very hard. It is pretty easy. But it is more hard to learn high level > libraries like DBIx::Class, Moose, POE and others, and these things are > different for other languages (if they have similar libs). Yes, you are right. Another problem is if you use Perl extensively and switch to (say) C, then you might program in C like a Perl programmer. i.e., you keep forgetting to assign a data type to each variable. It takes some times to be equally good at more than one language; likewise, it takes a lot of time to be good at more than one natural/spoken language. Ray -- To unsubscribe, e-mail: beginners-unsubscr...@perl.org For additional commands, e-mail: beginners-h...@perl.org http://learn.perl.org/
