This is unfortunately near the mark.
I myself am a few months from 20, been using Perl just over a year.
I've known Java for years, and that was the language of my school (University of Waterloo, in Ontario, Canada) for the first year, but then we move to C++.
Fortunately most of my fellow Comp Sci majors are skeptical and intelligent enough to not just drink the Java Kool-Aid without question. Still, they look at me funny when I mention Perl. By the time they finish asking me why I use such a dead/write-only/old/etc. language, my work is done, and that's all the reason I need. A few are beginning to see the light.
Back when I was first learning Perl, I used to worry that loose typing would "guess wrong" and cause problems, and the parameter passing was almost too weird to accept.
Eventually, I got used to this, and now it's the opposite: In Java or C++ I'm constantly wishing for map, reduce and grep. It takes so long to get anything done in those languages. At least C++ runs fast when you finally get finished. | [reply] |