Interesting way of putting it. Though I can't say I totally agree that it's not for "ready-to-go out-of-the-box" stuff. Visual Basic + DLL Hell isn't a much more exciting prospect to look forward to. I speak from experience at my last job, where we simply could not get our internal report generation program to run on any but one of the computers in the office (because of missing DLL's and other odd errors).

I would argue that Visual Basic + DLL Hell isn't designed to provide any solution for anyone :-D but when I said "ready-to-go out-of-the-box" I was referring to pre-compiled binaries... probably written in C or C++ or something like that. Any such generic solutions have inherent limitations because they're generic... the binary can't take into account all the little in's and out's of my particular system, and because they're precompiled they can't take into account all the intricacies of my problem at hand. A generic binary can often be a good solution to a problem, but a custom-made solution can be made perfect.

That's where I think Perl is the bomb... it gives you a relatively easy tool to provide a perfect, customized solution. (Sure, you could write your own binary in C, but why when it's so much more fun to do it in Perl. :-D)

Gary Blackburn
Trained Killer