I discoverd Perl about 4 months ago after I dusted off Programming Perl 2nd edition.. if that shows you how long I had been _meaning_ to learn it. And I'd have to say that's it's (not so) slowly becomming my language of choice. There's a few gotcha's for me, but that's there with any language. I've worked with C/C++, java, vb, asmbler etc.. but on to the point..

Each and every one of these languages has it's place and purpose. When I first started to pick up Perl, I really struggled with writing it. "What do you mean it it figures out if it's a string or an integer?!" That's a really tough concept to find peace with when your pervious language of choice was C. The layers of abstraction were a little more acceptable with something like VB since it seemed like a toy language anyway. BUT.. even VB has it's place.

I promised a point, right?

I guess the point is that even though you may love Perl, learn what you can of other languages. My least favorite language is probably Java for it's slowness.. and don't talk about compiled java because then it just looses it's whole damn purpose in the furst place. But it still has it's place too. It's another tool.. and programming is about "programming", not about which language you use. Design is the key.. and you choose the language to meet the needs. You're not going to use Java or Perl for RTOS programming.. and you're not (or shouldn't) use C to do some simple one liner shell script. And even though I'd love to.. I'm not going to pump perl out to thousands of Wintel desktops so I can write login scripts in Perl instead of batch files or vbscript/jscript. OK.. maybe I would if we were still left with just batch files but..

Anyway.. to make a short point longer, Java is just another tool. Tools are good. And even bad tools teach you something.