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I find it humorous when people make ignorant
statements regarding Perl without information of any sorts to back it. For
some reason, the majority of people in the IT community (if that's what you want
to call it) have this misconception that Perl is -only- for writing CGI
applications or for templating your dynamic web pages. Definitely, it is
used in both of these web-related areas and for good reason. However, Perl
is such a powerful language and much more than simply the "duct tape of the
internet" or whatever other catchy phrase you can come up with.
My theory on this effort to make Perl sound trivial
and classify it as a simple scripting language is because the educational system
in universities and such want a clear, standard means of doing everything.
They want to be able to say "THIS IS HOW YOU..." and not have to deal with
other potential examples. Programming in Perl allows for more creativity
than most other options and that is scary grounds for someone who has learned to
write programs using pascal, C, etc. Perl can be effective in any project,
regardless of size of source/development teams, with the only requirement being
to force extensive documenting of code and educating your programmers to write
good, modular, well-documented code.
People catch wind of these trends in development
tools and spend all their efforts in riding whats popular, only to become that
cubicle coder you always told yourself you would never be. Instead, I
challenge people to support creative programming communities (like Perl) that
are continually trying to provide free code (CPAN) to save you time and write
efficient, well-designed applications.
</rant>
Tim Hart
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