Honestly, only once in my 20+ year IT career has Perl been the sole focus of my profession. Perl is more apt to be used by me as a tool. As a Unix Engineer I use Perl for all sorts of things. Data scrubbing, data manipulation, data gaterhing, monitor scripts, intrusion detection, virus activity detection, reporting etc. etc and the list goes on. You get the idea.

Even using Perl as a tool and not the sole source of my income I find myself constantly on a search to "do it better" as any true professional should.

My maternal grandfather was a brick layer. Well konwn by other tradesman as being a master craftsman of the highest order in all phases of masonry. Considering in his day tradesmen in the building and other associated industries were a steely eyed lot who were not impressed easiliy this was high praise from his peers,

In spite of his having "made it" in his chosen profession Grandpa was constanly honing his skills, trying different techniques, innovating new methods and generally improving himself as he went along. Again, in my mind this is what seperates the true craftsman from the guy who just does it for a living.

Any profession that you take pride in what you are doing this is true. You constantly want to upgrade your skills. For me that means constantly writing in code. The language doesn't matter, it's that I'm writing.

You mention Java, Struts, (you didn't mention Tiles). I'd say step back and go one further if you are going to go down that road. Look at the entire JSP/Servlet/J2EE world and learn all you can. Install a Tomcat or Cocoon product on a machine you can safely tinker and and write some simple apps and just go from there.

Just as an aside I did that very recently myself. I ended up learning Weblogic, JSP and Servlets out of self defense. One of the developers I was supporting in my Solaris role kept insisting the reason his application kept crashing was due to a misconfigured Solaris environment. Over time I was able to prove to everyone's satisfaction (except his) that the JSP code was rotten.

So while Perl is my favorite environment to program in, I sill don't hesitate to move out of my comfort zone and learn new things. Hell, I even use Perl sometimes to assist in my Java development tasks. But that's a future CUFP. :-)

I had a manager once tell me that after you reach age 40 you shouldn't bother leaning anything new. I voiced the opinion to him that that's true if you want to be seen by your peers, subordinates and higher ups as a dinosaur. If you stop learning, as far as I'm concerned, you're dead.

Peter L. Berghold -- Unix Professional
Peter -at- Berghold -dot- Net; AOL IM redcowdawg Yahoo IM: blue_cowdawg

In reply to Re: Market Stupid to Understand Perl by blue_cowdawg
in thread Market Stupid to Understand Perl by pengwn

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