You will find that some programmers can be quite fanatical about their choice of programming language to the point that they no longer see the reasons why anyone should choose another language to program in. And while there may not be that much of a problem with that, programmers sometimes lose sight that the best programming language is the programming language that does what you need it to do quickly and efficiently. The best tool for the job.

Perl is a very good programming language to solve general-purpose problems involving 90% text and 10% just about everything else. It's used for CGI on websites, it's used with databases, it's used with XML and many other things, as a poke around CPAN or PerlMonks will tell you.

Java, on the other hand, is a completely different type of programming language, in that it's object-orientated. That doesn't mean that Perl and Java couldn't solve a given problem, but it just means that there are some things Java could do better than Perl, and vice versa.

ASP is a technology that enables you to make dynamic and interactive web pages, using server-side scripting to dynamically produce web pages that are not affected by the type of browser the web site visitor is using. The default scripting language used for writing ASP is VBScript, although you can use other scripting languages like JScript (Microsoft's version of JavaScript). Perl can do what ASP can do, but Perl is more general-purpose than ASP.

If you really want to know whether Perl is better than language x, learn them both (or, even better, persuade those who prefer language x to learn Perl :) ) and try to solve the same problem in both of the languages, and then see which one you start to use more when tasks need to be done.

And remember, if there was a superior programming language, everyone who's anyone would be using it ;)

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rozallin j. thompson
The Webmistress who doesn't hesitate to use strict;