Being a chronic insomniac, I was sitting up in bed around 4a.m. going over some scripts in my mind, when my brain went off on a tangent. I looked across the room, saw all the text books ( O'Reilly and books from the university ) on my shelf and looked at all the languages I knew. I looked over my O'Reilly books and saw that out of almost 20 books, more than half were PERL related books, when a thought struck me: Why do I like PERL? An odd question since I prefer to do all my coding in PERL, but even odder, I couldn't come up with a decent answer.

Sure I could have gone with technical aspects of PERL and why I like certain operatives, but it didn't seem to cut it. It was like saying, "I like this movie only for its inventive camera angles and artistic subtext," when the movie is just plain entertaining. Yes there are tons of aspects of PERL that make me want to write every program I can in it, but the main reason is that it just entertains me. I discovered PERL as I was learning Linux because Uruk suggested it and I picked up Learning PERL after reading Larry Wall's incredible foreward, and was hooked. I write mainly in JAVA for my classes, and the worst thing about that is I have to wait to finish a program before I can get back to my PERL scripts.

So after deliberating on the subject my mind settled on "I simply enjoy writing PERL where other languages at times bore me." And after scolding my brain for wasting time ( stupid brain! Stop going off on tangents before I stab you with a q-tip ), I settled back into reviewing my scripts.

Note: In no way is this posting suggesting that all languages are inferior to PERL. There are certain things I would never want to code in PERL ( see jcwren's comments on Device Drivers in PERL ). Some things just don't need or can't handle PERL. For instance, when talking to jcwren about embedded systems he mentioned that PERL is just too big to use and he prefers C ( correct me if I'm wrong on that, jcwren ), yet I have seen things that he's written, such as the Perl Monks Stats, and the Amateur Radio Relay, and I get the feeling that perhaps I am not the only one who writes PERL simply because it enterains me.

Macphist0

Everyone has their demons....

In reply to Late night revelation of PERL by Macphisto

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