Every time I read something about PHP, Python, or Ruby, I'm confronted - by myself - with a question:
Why don't you learn one of those? The answer is always, "I know Perl."
After readering this post, Why I chose Python over Ruby, I was again confronted with the question. "Maybe I should learn Python. Or maybe I should dive into Ruby ... give it a shot." The problem is, I know Perl. Why would I bother with any of the others? What real advantage does knowing one of those languages give me? Ok, Rails may be great. Catalyst. Any other reason? Cleaner syntax? Are you serious? That's the big reason I should switch from Perl to Ruby? Or Python? I don't know. Seems like a really weak reason. Do people really think the problem with unreadable code is in the language? Sure, there are cases where that's the case - i.e., Brainfuck. But more often than not, it's a bad programmer that results in unreadable code. Fascist whitespace rules won't fix that.
So, in short, the reason I stick with Perl is that there's nothing else that is better, or better enough to bother with. There's More Than One Right Way To Do It. My right way is Perl.
After readering this post, Why I chose Python over Ruby, I was again confronted with the question. "Maybe I should learn Python. Or maybe I should dive into Ruby ... give it a shot." The problem is, I know Perl. Why would I bother with any of the others? What real advantage does knowing one of those languages give me? Ok, Rails may be great. Catalyst. Any other reason? Cleaner syntax? Are you serious? That's the big reason I should switch from Perl to Ruby? Or Python? I don't know. Seems like a really weak reason. Do people really think the problem with unreadable code is in the language? Sure, there are cases where that's the case - i.e., Brainfuck. But more often than not, it's a bad programmer that results in unreadable code. Fascist whitespace rules won't fix that.
So, in short, the reason I stick with Perl is that there's nothing else that is better, or better enough to bother with. There's More Than One Right Way To Do It. My right way is Perl.