I have had the experience you fear, but the other way round.

Way back when, my primary languages were C and TCL - I had been working on a large TCL project for about 18 months when it was abruptly canned, coincidentally shortly after I'd started delving into Perl a bit in my spare time.

During the next 12 months I hardly touched TCL, and wrote mostly C and Perl. Then I needed to automate a remote process, and wanted to use Expect for it. Everything went fine until I needed a regular expression - not a problem, I'd been churning the things out with ease just 12 months earlier, except now I found that I couldn't work out how to escape it. Not even with the manual in front of me. My brain simply didn't want to take it.

I spent about a day fighting the dang thing, then decided life was too short, gave up, and did it another way. I've tried to use Expect a couple of times in the 8 years since, with much the same results.

I still believe TCL is a fine language, and maybe when Perl5/6 and Parrot are a reality I'll be able to play with it once more, knowing that I have the freedom to skip out to Perl when I need a regexp.

Hugo

In reply to Re: perl primary, and keeping multiple languages in your head, and ruby by hv
in thread perl primary, and keeping multiple languages in your head, and ruby by water

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