Hi,

I understand his arguments and in fact think they are very valid from his perspective. Let me explain that in more detail:

• I've met "really really bad" Perl coders. They were quite experienced in Perl and their craft was often nontrivial. So why were they THAT bad? Well - they thought they were very good. They were intelligent, they obviously knew (or thought to) that they "master" an extraordinary language, so they felt like XPs.

  What happened? Most of these guys were young and had no experience in larger scale projects. They virtually laughed at requests like commenting code and programming cleanly, using a certain indentation and set of idioms. In that sense, the 2nd argument of your boss was right.

• But in my opinion this problem applies only to young wild Perlies AND to (project) managers that are not strong enough to either persuade the Perlies for the necessity of discipline or to take the bitter consequence to fire a young programmer that could develop into a real elite if only he had more insight.

  Then again, this also supports arg 1 of your boss.

• Perl is complex. To harness its power in large scale projects needs many things: good people (skill, discipline) both at the programmers and the project managers side, the WILL to solve problems and the bias towards elegant technological solutions, i.e. not only programming to solve something, but to program to solve a problem ELEGANTLY too. Especially with perl. This is very contrary to most perl scripts out there because Perl often serves the glue/guick'n'dirty paradigm!

To sum up: I think your boss is right, because his needs are probably technologically not THAT rocket science, but it is utterly important that the jobs get done.

Then again, if you feel different about this, you're in the wrong company.

There are companies, that wouldn't touch VBScript even if they'd need to fly the right Perl programmers in from all over the world.

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