Hi there. I enjoyed reading the Perl vs. COBOL tutorial, but I have to confess that it made me sad. I've worked in the same company with COBOL programmers before, and they were themselves dinosaurs. The company kept them around to wrangle the old mainframes used for the financial management system. They seemed to lead this joyless existence of concentration on minutiae, to such an extent that it actually warped their personalities (or maybe only already-warped people could stay in such a job so long). They were nitpicky, bureaucratic-minded, authoritarian, and devoid of creativity, just like the language itself. Aside from that tragedy, I am always saddened to see a programmer who has stopped learning. Creatively, such a person might as well be dead. As Larry Wall said, "Death is bad. I reject death. I will stay way from trucks today."