If only I had the time!

I think a lot of it has to do with the extreme flexibility of perl. Where Java pretty much forces you down the 'design first' route, and C/C++ takes days before you get it to do anything (OK, that might just be me :-|), perl allows everything from a pre-designed, structured solution worthy of shrinkwrapping to a quick bodge to solve the problem, in the same language. Full on software engineers, code monkeys and occasional scripters can all use the same language.
Plus of course the huge quantity of code freely available to solve any given problem
Both these things draw in lots of people with different priorities and needs from the language, and hence different ways of approaching a given problem.

charles.

In reply to Re: "people watching" by Anonymous Monk
in thread "people watching" by Tanktalus

Title:
Use:  <p> text here (a paragraph) </p>
and:  <code> code here </code>
to format your post, it's "PerlMonks-approved HTML":


  • Posts are HTML formatted. Put <p> </p> tags around your paragraphs. Put <code> </code> tags around your code and data!
  • Titles consisting of a single word are discouraged, and in most cases are disallowed outright.
  • Read Where should I post X? if you're not absolutely sure you're posting in the right place.
  • Please read these before you post! —
  • Posts may use any of the Perl Monks Approved HTML tags:
    a, abbr, b, big, blockquote, br, caption, center, col, colgroup, dd, del, details, div, dl, dt, em, font, h1, h2, h3, h4, h5, h6, hr, i, ins, li, ol, p, pre, readmore, small, span, spoiler, strike, strong, sub, summary, sup, table, tbody, td, tfoot, th, thead, tr, tt, u, ul, wbr
  • You may need to use entities for some characters, as follows. (Exception: Within code tags, you can put the characters literally.)
            For:     Use:
    & &amp;
    < &lt;
    > &gt;
    [ &#91;
    ] &#93;
  • Link using PerlMonks shortcuts! What shortcuts can I use for linking?
  • See Writeup Formatting Tips and other pages linked from there for more info.