I realized something the other day. I've been programming in Perl for roughly seven or eight years now. Maybe nine. It's hard to remember for sure. But at some point it lost its shine. It used to be a lot of fun. I programmed for the hell of it. I loved the Perl culture and community. I didn't dream of using anything else.

Anymore, I'm really seeing Perl as just another language/tool/whatever. I feel compelled to start looking into other languages--namely Ruby and Python, just to stimulate that part of my brain and have some fun again.

I don't know when this all happened, but it has really only come to my attention recently. I suppose it's natural. I mean, how long can you program in the same language before it get a little old?

Or maybe it's part of something larger that I haven't figured out yet.

Posted by jzawodn at October 02, 2002 10:52 PM

Reader Comments
# Dan Isaacs said:

And that, my freind, is why you are a Code Whore. Just can't stay with one language. 7,8,9 years go by and you get bored. On to some other temporary love. Ruby..is she a red-head?

on October 3, 2002 06:12 AM
# joshw said:

Ruby rocks. It takes awhile to get used to the syntax, but what language doesn't? It really lends itself well to clean code. The big drawback I came up against about a year ago when I learned it was that a lot of things were *really* slow. As in orders of magnitude slower than perl. It may have just been me misunderstanding how it optimizes code, but it sure happened a lot. *shrugs*

on October 3, 2002 09:23 AM
# DWILSON said:

Perl IS just another tool, the main difference in my view is that it used to stand head above the rest of the tools available; only problem is that a lot of the other tools have caught up and in some cases started to lap us.

on October 5, 2002 03:56 AM
# havoc said:

Jeremy,

I'm looking for secondary language, but not from bordom. I'm a Perl hack, but Perl doesn't go everywhere I need it to go.

I have a server that runs under Linux/Apache/Perl, but I'd like a client to attach to it. The client really needs to run on Windows and Mac as well as Linux. Since more ludites aren't going to bother installing Perl or Python on their systems to check for new messages, I need a compiled package to install on their box.

I've purchased a license for Perl2Exe, but that results in a 2+MB file. Using Spoon (which uses bzip), it still ends up turning a 9.0k Perl script into a 1.1 MB download!

So, I'm looking for a language that will allow me to develop on Linux, compile for Linux/Win/Mac/MacX, leverage my Perl (as much as possible), and have fun. It must also be Free and free.

Right now I'm looking at OCaml, but everything else has been just plain frustrating.

havoc

on October 6, 2002 08:41 PM
# Walter Maner said:

Jeremy,

If you want to compare perl, python and ruby, check out

http://www.bagley.org/~doug/shootout/

Walt

on January 5, 2003 05:49 PM
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