use Perl

The passage that Tony cites deals with what "programmer productivity" means. It was taken from a paper presented at APL 99 from the author of the Zark Library of Utility Functions. With a search term like that, google returns a very focused result set. :-) Most of the results point to the ACM Digital Library citation, but this one contains a summary of the author's plenary address to the APL 99 conference, where he addresses 14 myths about APL, including:

• APL is Unreadable

  “You know what, Russian is unreadable, I don’t know Russian, so it’s unreadable. If you don’t know it, it’s unreadable.”

• APL is Unmaintainable

  Because APL is unreadable, it’s a write-only language, hence is unmaintainable.

• Avoided re-inventing the wheel

  “If we did not re-invent the wheel this would be a Cobol conference, we would have leeches all over our bodies, we would be using 8-track tapes.”

  You should always be re-examining the wheel.

The full summary is quite inciteful. Especially the discussion about The Bergquist Equation of Productivity.