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Re: Perl - Fortune 500 quality?



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
codermsu@earthlink.net