On Thu, 2 Oct 2008, Steve Cayford wrote: > Dan Rue wrote: > >> I wouldn't bother with perl unless there's a legacy codebase you are >> interested in. They haven't released a new major version in some 10 >> years, and I don't think very many people choose it for *new* projects. >> It does still have a foothold in the sys admin's tool belt and is >> ubiquitous in server environments, but as a language it's frequently >> discounted now days for anything beyond glorified shell scripts. Still >> worth knowing at least superficially because you will run into it. >> > > Perl 5.10 just came out last December and both Perl 5 and Perl 6 are > under continuing development. Perl's heavily used in a lot of large > organizations and CPAN is huge and still growing. But he said "major version," and I doubt 5.10 counts as major. He isn't the only person telling me this. > I'm sure Ruby and Python are also very good. I don't have enough > experience to comment on them though. That is a typical kind of reaction -- people who have used a certain package for a long time and have become dependent on it tend to promote it. That's OK because they know what they are talking about and can tell you all the good features. The problem is when you want to compare two things, you'll get people on opposite sides who know all the great things about only one of the programs and nothing about the other programs. This is the cause of disputes like the Emacs vs vi wars. Mike