Every day I talk to people who still work in Cobol. It has a place in the world. So does VB - I just haven't found a place for it because I am no fan of closed proprietary languages and systems. I have also been in situations where a VB developer was being paid far too much money and delivering far too little. Five years ago, as a PERL neophyte but a 45 year old engineer I wrote a command line Perl programme in 2 days to do a job. My employer contracted for a VB application to write a GUI version. It never completely worked but cost him $70,000. Just three months ago he asked if I could take a look and see if I could fix some of the worst bugs in it. I took a look at it, threw it in the bin and rewrote the whole thing in Perl/Tk in five days for a total cost of $US 5000.

The difference? I knew what the programme had to achieve and had all the resources of CPAN to handle network and serial port things. I even added some SNMP stuff which the Microsoft guru's had said was far too difficult and would require a complete re-write in C++.

Any language can be good in the right hands and when doing a job it is suited to. There is nothing fundamentally wrong with PHP - in it's place! I have a web app suite that is 27,000 lines of perl code (all the HTML is handled with HTML::Template and there are nearly 300 templates). I cannot imagine attempting that in PHP.

But I sometimes wish I knew PHP when I just want a simple single form application that is only going to be used for a week. A quick and dirty solution would sometimes be handy!

Don't be dissuaded, I am sure youi will hear from others about how we used to do things with 8k words of core and little or no mass storage at all. How well I remember those days, we could build an entire text editor to run in memory complete with buffer space, pity you had to write it out to paper tape to be able to go backwards beyond the buffer!

I do like the idea of asking your instructor how to do a diff on two 100gb files! Tickles my fancy :)

jdtoronto