On Thu, Oct 2, 2008 at 7:21 PM, Mike Miller <mbmiller at taxa.epi.umn.edu> wrote: > 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. By this same logic, the 2.2, 2.4, and 2.6 versions of the linux kernel all have the same "major version". Technically so, but that doesn't do justice to the changes under the hood. Having gotten that off my chest, I'd also suggest Python. It's a neat language. Perl is great too (I'm one of the organizers for the upcoming Frozen Perl 2009 workshop) but I'm currently having a lot of fun with Python. Using PHP as a general-purpose scripting language is something that people do when they don't have any better tools in their kit. That's fine if that's where you are, and you need to Get Things Done Right Now, but honestly, PHP has all of the drawbacks of Perl (and then some) and few of the benefits. JT