I'll give you an example. Recently, my company made a huge shift to windows. Prior, logs were made accessible via tail over ssh to a central box instead of letting developers have access to production machines. It worked flawlessly. If the connection dropped, the connection would be restarted.. and all that goodness. Now, they've switched to windows. Since they dont' allow ssh anymore, and only pcanywhere, we can't do this. Now we are being forced to switch to syslog. Points have been brought up on incomplete log files if a syslog entry is amiss and no auto-catchup. But they've switched anyway. Unfortunately, a worse off system has been put into place as entries sometimes time out and never get there, or if the receiving machine needs to be taken down, it can't get done during the day. Joy for everyone, eh?

Counter example, is recently we used php and perl, and had to switch away. We switched to java. I've been writing perl for 10 years now. I've also used other languages extensively, including perl and java for some good time now. I can write an orgniazed perl programs, and can engineer modules for reusability. Our new developer, with 2 months experience, needs to do my level of coding. Unfortunately, it results in me getting rid of unecessary code, putting code in better places for reusability or fixing function names. Using perl and php, it's quite hard to refactor these things and just have it rename everywhere applicable. The other part of it is, the company writes in java. There are only some things that work in java, like JMS and RMI. Well, it could be hacked to death, but i'm not here to hack. java was decided to be used for better integration and tools to support ourselves.

A third side, is recently, I have to do simulations with graph colouring. We were asked to do it OO. Professor asked me, 1 of 6 people, what language I would do it in. When i said perl, I was told how the code would be messy and it would be hard. I finished it about the same time as anyone else could. Doesnt' prove perl is good or bad, but it's a good tool for what I was doing. It was good for me, 'cause I wrote less code than I would in java.

Lesson to be learned? There are reasons for everything. Sometimes they are bad, sometimes good. Do yourself a favour. Sit and ask your boss why things are changing. If he gives you bad suggestions, think it out with him. You aren't there to write perl. You are there to do work. If it involves you writing code in lisp, there's not much you can do. If it makes money within a reasonable amount of time w/o too much trouble for the company, you will probably use that. If you dont' want to use c#, that's absolutely fine. But unless you can prove to them why another language is better and get it integrated w/o issue, then you'll have a huge uphill battle to fight.

But please, don't go 'cause of that. perlmonks is about perl, and it's not. It's about figuring how to hack it to death, and understand it, but it's also a place of understanding problems and solutions. What you can do in perl, you can similarly do in other languages. Being here won't be useless. -s out.