Re: web script jockey crisis

I'd like to defend Matt a little. I don't know him, but I think we must give him some credit for popularizing Perl. If wasn't for him, maybe I'd never looked into a Perl script and fell in love with it like I did. It was because of the scipts I've found there that I was interested in learning Perl. Since then I'm writing huge web apps, so I'm pretty happy that I've once found MSA.

Remember that Perl was being used for CGI before Matt and his scripts came along. This was because the original webmasters were the same sysadmins who had found Perl to be a great language for all their shell scripting needs.

Matt may have popularised Perl, but he also did a great deal of damage to its reputation. A large number of people see Perl as a "script-kiddies toy" and as a language to be avoided for writing enterprise level applications. We know they are wrong, but I'm not sure that we'll ever be able to persuade them otherwise.

--
<http://www.dave.org.uk>

"The first rule of Perl club is you do not talk about Perl club."
-- Chip Salzenberg

Comment on Re: web script jockey crisis

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Re: Re: web script jockey crisis by davorg (Chancellor) on Apr 17, 2002 at 09:45 UTC
he [Matt Wright] also did a great deal of damage to its [Perl's] reputation I should probably explain what I mean by contentious statements like that. For a significant proportion of people (especially those who aren't career programmers) their first exposure to Perl is seeing one of Matt's scripts. Matt has said that when he wrote the scripts he was just learning to program. Therefore the code in the scripts is often over-complex and difficult to understand. I think this makes a significant contribution to Perl's reputation as a "write-only" language. This isn't helped by the number of people who seem to equate popularity with quality and assume that Matt's scripts are good examples of well-written Perl. -- <http://www.dave.org.uk> "The first rule of Perl club is you do not talk about Perl club." -- Chip Salzenberg	[reply]

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Re: Re: web script jockey crisis
by davorg (Chancellor) on Apr 17, 2002 at 09:45 UTC

he [Matt Wright] also did a great deal of damage to its [Perl's] reputation

I should probably explain what I mean by contentious statements like that.

For a significant proportion of people (especially those who aren't career programmers) their first exposure to Perl is seeing one of Matt's scripts. Matt has said that when he wrote the scripts he was just learning to program. Therefore the code in the scripts is often over-complex and difficult to understand. I think this makes a significant contribution to Perl's reputation as a "write-only" language. This isn't helped by the number of people who seem to equate popularity with quality and assume that Matt's scripts are good examples of well-written Perl.

http://www.dave.org.uk

"The first rule of Perl club is you do not talk about Perl club."
-- Chip Salzenberg

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