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

In reply to Re: web script jockey crisis by davorg
in thread Are we obsessed with CGI? by rinceWind

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