I've seen that too. Some engineering managers have an absolute phobia
when it comes to Perl. But some of these same managers turn right
around and extol the virtues of Ruby. Go figure. As far as I can tell,
beyond a lot of syntactic sugar the two are virtually indistinguishable
- except that Perl has been around longer and runs a lot deeper. Same
with Python.
I think a lot of the debate boils down to culture. Perl people tend to
come from a sysadmin culture and are more comfortable working where the
rubber hits the road. PHP people tend to come from web dev, and really
don't see the need to go too far beyond dynamic web pages. Ruby and
Python people tend to be Java refugees. But the skill set involved in
writing good code is no different, regardless of your background.
Any developer with a solid object-oriented background in ANY of these
languages can move comfortably into ANY of the others within a few
days. And none of them is Java - thank God!
Also, remember that being a typed language does not make object-oriented
design patterns any easier. If you read the original "Gang of 4" book
there is no mention of Java or Ruby - in 1995 both were in their
infancy! But they do talk about Smalltalk, which is untyped. Try that
argument the next time you hit one of these "perl is evil" majordomos.
You won't get the job, of course, but it will brighten up your day.
d
J. Peng wrote:
I like Perl than others. once a company wanted to hire me and gave me
much higher salary than the current job. But one of their conditions
is not permit to use perl, but use python instead. I'm familiar with
python too, but I hate that clause. So I gave up that job finally.:)
On Tue, Feb 26, 2008 at 6:21 PM, Aaron Trevena <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
On 23/02/2008, Michael Lackhoff <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
> - Perl usage is declining. I read some statistics from O'Reilly and
> they showed that Perl book sales are going down.
> A few years ago the 'P' in LAMP clearly was 'Perl', now it is 'PHP'
> in most cases. Developers tend to go (even if slowly) where the money
> is.
Sorry, you're making wild claims there - yes ORA perl book sales are
down, but then that really doesn't indicate much - most of the ORA
perl books have been around for ages and are on their 3rd or 4th
reprint. Hardly a surprise.
If you look at other more useful numbers you can see that the number
of contributors to CPAN and perl projects in increasing, the number of
jobs is steady or increasing, and that actually it's all rather
healthy.
A.
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