Besides which people tend to pay more attention to your advocacy when you have demonstrated that you try to offer what you consider the best answer in all situations.

As for VB, here are its advantages in my opinion. It is quite good for building quick and dirty GUI interfaces to use on Windows, and Microsoft's integration of it with their line of products, which are widely used. I don't like it as a language, but when the problem fits I reach for VB, not Perl. (OTOH I angle things so that the problem does not often fit...)

Actually, it should be. I have discovered a truly remarkable proof of this, which this post is unfortunately too small to contain.

Ok, I admit it, I use perl incessantly, and I love every second of it, but lets be perfectly honest, there is a right tool for every job. If I'm doing list processing, a LISP variant is probably the right tool. Logical analysis, better look at prolog if I want to get the job done quick. Writing to the processor? Writing an OS? Better look at C and ASM. Lets not forget that Larry Wall and the Porters write perl, and love perl, certainly as much as anyone else around here, and they write it in C. What am I saying??? Right tool, right job... Perl is a GREAT tool, it's the programmer's all purpose chainsaw! I doubt that Quake IV will be written in perl, however.

Just Another Perl Backpacker

I do agree with you. But as far as my experience goes, I think that Perl is best for general programming, and if speed is an issue, C(++) should be used. But from within Perl, that would mean, writing most stuff in Perl itself, and use the speed-needing code in C, and link it to Perl with XS.

I've used lots of environments, Prolog, Pascal, C (a little), Mapper, Progress 4GL, REXX, but never found a language that suited for so many different tasks like Perl does.

I don't know anything about LISP, but I can't imagine that it would be worth learning if Perl speeds up my productivity as much as it does...

Jouke Visser, Perl 'Adept'

Petruchio,
So please feel free to e-mail it (or even a link) to me.
And yes, I agree to all who say, that something people like so much that they point out their good experiences with it, seems to be good and efficient.
But does that imply that all other solutions are worse?
I don't trust statistics except those I've made up :-))

little: "So please feel free to e-mail it (or even a link) to me."

Actually, it was just a joke... and since the explanation is sort of interesting, I'll go into it.

Take the equation of this general form, rendered here in Perl:

($x**$n + $y**$n) == $z**$n;

The Pythagorean Theorem, which you doubtless remember, involves a special case:

($x**2 + $y**2) == $z**2;

In 1637, Pierre de Fermat claimed that the general equation was false for any case where ($n > 2); this became known as Fermat's Last Theorem. The theorem was proven only recently, in enormously complex fashion, after about 350 years of anguished mathmeticians losing sleep over it.

Which brings us to the joke. Fermat, in describing his theorem, noted, "I have discovered a truly marvellous proof, which this margin is too narrow to contain." Which is fairly ridiculous; he pretty certainly discovered no such thing. And neither have I.