The strengths of perl have been more than adequately covered by fellow monks elsewhere on this thread, so I won't (& don't even need to) even begin to contribute on that score.

I would, however, as a perl advocate/evangelist, submit the following as potential weaknesses of the language...

• From the numerous experiences of watching/overseeing others learn the language, not to have a *NIX background appears to be significantly disadvantageous - if for no other reasons than the lack of appreciation of either regular expressions or *NIX-like tools.
• Furthermore, the majority of learners come from a background whereby language of choice imposes definitive rules & constraints whereas, as we all know, in perl, TIMTOWTDI - both of which appear to combine to cause no end of problems in this scenario. IMCO, this appears to be especially prevalent where the incumbent only has Java as a previous language - a mindset seemingly requiring disproportionate effort to overcome. A problem exacerbated when Eclipse is the development environment of choice - fine for Java, but despite the commendable best efforts of the E-P-I-C project, IMO, very poor for perl.

I appreciate that the latter could be overcome to some degree thro' the use of suitable coding standards etc. ... but I've found that this only addresses maybe 10 - 15 % of the problem - the beast, though tamed slightly, obstinately remains to be overcome.

...just my 10 penn'orth

---

---

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! —

• How do I compose an effective node title?
• How do I post a question effectively?
• Markup in the Monastery

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:
	&		&
	<		&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.