I'm going to list a few things you might hear if you get a job at a place that doesn't use perl. Not every place will be like this but some will. I think it depends on the people who started the company and the culture that developed in the company. If you are worried about the company's view on perl you can always ask before accepting the job.

I also recommend reading Scripting: Higher Level Programming for the 21st Century by John Ousterhout.

• If we distribute programs in perl people can see our source code.
• It's not as fast as compiled C.
• Code in perl is ugly and hard to understand.
• No one eles (here) knows perl.
• Perl is used by hacks. (ie lazy programmers who do messy work.)
• Perl is a web language.

The above points all have some basis in fact from someone's point of view but they don't tell the whole story. Perl code may be easier to reverse engineer than compiled C code. If your program's workings are important enough compiled C code can be dissassembled too.

Any language is hard to read if you don't know it. All of the C programmers in the shop may not know perl but 1) they might be able to learn, they might even be excited about it 2) you can hire other people. Both of those options do have a price.

Don't be discouraged. I have worked at places that don't use perl and I wrote perl code for little things while working at those places. Usually when people see how much faster development goes they come around at least a little bit.

After a while people learn that you like the language and that it's powerful. Now I have friends contacting me to write perl for contract work. On that note it's 10:30 PM and I have work to do. ;)

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