use Perl

A few months ago I sat at dinner with a group of strangers and some aquaintences. Upon hearing my name and the company I worked for one member of the group started complaining about Perl. I suspect he preferred Php, but that isn't relevant. Anyway he kept on and on about it. I just nodded and tried to talk to someone else. I *could* have disagreed but what would be the point? If I've ever seen someone trolling in real life it was this guy.

A while later I was at a user groups day run by a friendly local business. Perl Mongers got to share a small side room with another programming language group - it doesn't matter who. We were told that we weren't allowed to fight... heh. As the day went on visitors asked us about Perl and sometimes then for comparisons between Python or Php or Java or C or ... I answered these as best as I could and had a great time. The most amusing incidents were when someone coming from the other side of the room relayed to us things they'd said about Perl. If we weren't such friendly people at the PM stand maybe we would have cared.

I'm a right tools for the job person. I like Perl, I see Perl as a great tool for most jobs, but it's just a tool and sometimes it isn't the right tool.

It doesn't bother me when someone tells me they like Python better. Why should it? Just because I don't like coding without curly braces doesn't mean that it's a bad programming language.

It doesn't bother me when someone tells me that they like Php better than Perl. The way I figure it is, if you know one of Php or Perl learning the other one is pretty easy.

It does bother me when people make discussions about tools of choice personal. And it bothers me more when people feel a need to criticise another programming language to feel better about their own choice. It doesn't matter if they're criticising Perl or praising Perl, it's just strange.

So anyway, I got an email today wherein the author asked us for our favourite scripting languages.. as I read the opening I thought of answering... When I got to the bit about knowing Perl but thinking Python was cleaner I decided not to. What could I add? When I got to the part which mentioned C, C++ and Java I just laughed! I've never seen those lumped in as scripting languages before.

I get concerned that if I do reply to emails like that then it'll just end up as a big pointless argument. I'm all for promoting Perl, it's what pays for my expensive lifestyle ;) but not by insisting on any concept of the one true way. So I just kept my mouth shut.