Re: A question for the newbies

[Mark Galbreath]

I've been developing apps for business, ecommerce, and government in Java for 6 years.  I developed Web sites with Perl 5.0 CGI in the mid-1990s but never much cared for it outside of its excellent string maniulation, being attracted to the pure OO languages. I spent the last 2 years developing in C# ASP.NET and PHP 5.0.  Why did I come back to Perl?   Not voluntarily.  Competition from foreign developers, mostly from India, and companies outsourcing to offshore companies, mostly in India and Indonesia, depressed contracting rates all along the DC - Boston tech corridor for Java programmers.  .NET has not been widely accepted as a replacement for Java or the installed base of VB 6.0 apps and so opportunities are sparse.  I came back to Perl because I was unemployed for 6 months and this was the only decent job (pay the mortgage, college tuition, eat) I could find.  Seems like I have come full-circle over 10 years.   Nevertheless, I was very, very happy to find that in those intervening 10 years, Perl became OO with 5.6 and the 5.6 debug version, 5.8.  My perl code is now rife with double colons and reference arrows.  I miss the reference dot notation of Java and other OO languages, however.  Why didn't Larry include that?  And the 'use v. require' issue seems silly to me.  Why not a simple 'import' statement?  And the accessor schema and issues of 'my v. our v. local' and package transparency seems hackneyed to me.  Perhaps 6.0 will address issues like these?  I haven't looked.   Depsite my criticisms, I found that my fears of having to go "backwards" to a procedural language were unfounded.  Like C++, you can write procedural code in perl, but you'll soon be replaced by H1-B contractors if you do.  :-)   Mark<-|->kraM Perl does Reflection. >>> Clinton Gormley <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> 16-Feb-06 08:41:02 AM >>> It seems to me that a lot of people new to mod_perl and to Perl have joined this mailing list recently. And this is during a period when popular opinion (amongst those who know no better) seems to regard Perl as antiquated. I'm delighted that new people are joining. My question is, what prompted you? What made you choose Perl above Java/.Net/Python/Ruby etc etc Do you have experience of those languages? What appeals to you about Perl? And how do you find your community experience/support compared to the other languages you know? clint