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Re: Re: Fearing the demise of Perl

by Steve_p (Priest)
on May 22, 2004 at 02:36 UTC ( [id://355522]=note: print w/replies, xml ) Need Help??


in reply to Re: Fearing the demise of Perl
in thread Fearing the demise of Perl

No it isn't, but it usually should be a consideration, and it should be a major consideration when you decide what community you should support, what programming language to add to a school curriculum, and what language should be used by programmers you hire.

In fact, all of these reasons are poor reasons for choosing a language. If you look at the top U.S. schools in Computer Science, you'll find Scheme and Lisp as one of the first languages taught, even though, as shown above, popularity exceptionally low. Why would they teach such unpopular languages? Because they believe that teaching good programming skills are more important than teaching specific languages.

As far as what community you support, that should have very little to do with the popularity. You should support whatever community you feel comfortable with whether its Perl or Scheme or COBOL. If popularity was the only factor, JavaJunkies would have three times the posts of this site. That is certainly not the case.

Finally, judging programmers by the languanges they know and not by the skills they bring to the table is a recipe for disaster. For example, I am working on a project that included a Java programming component. Three programmers were working on it. Two were marginal programmers with experience in Java. The other was an exceptional programmer C programmer with real-time programming experience, but no Java experience. Most of you know can guess the result, but the former C programmer easily outcoded the other two. Although he took some extra time early lerning the language, his skills quickly made up for it as his code was not only better thought out, it was been tested and designed. In the end, he was actually teaching the other two about several features in the Java libraries that the two knew nothing about, and greatly tightened up their code as well.

For most experienced programmers, learning (most) new languages is as easy as changing your socks. Learning to program well, however, takes a great deal of time, aptitude, and desire. Its very humbling as well. It means admitting mistakes. At times means asking dumb questions. It means learning from your mistakes.

Good programmers, however, rarely have to worry about work. Work usually finds them. Some choose to work in just one language, although some don't care what language they work in as long as the work fills their needs. Do I worry that Perl work will stop coming to me? No, Perl work continues to find me, and it will as long as I want it to.

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