If you're involved in the early stages of a project, and you think Perl is the best choice for it, by all means express your opinion and back it up. Perhaps they just haven't heard of Perl being used in these types of things. You'd get bonus points for having a working prototype in an hour. Rapid development = major $$$ savings.

I agree with Fastolfe on this, but I've got to add that you have to make your argument stand on both technical and financial merits. If you're the only Perl programmer in a shop of 35 Javaheads, and even though you could produce it in half of the time of the Javaheads, the cost of training them and the support costs could far outweigh the cost of doing it with existing tools and skill sets.

Although Perl is a great language, don't let personal bias (or language religion) drive the decision. In fact, if people perceive you as someone who favors a particular language but recognizes the technical merit of others, and knows when how and when to concede the argument gracefully, you'll get far more respect than if you just wander the halls bashing all other languages (and possibly decisions that you don't understand the full constaint set of).

If you have a few moments, I think the last paragraph of (jcwren) RE: RE: why i may have to leave perl... expresses well how I feel about language bigotry.

--Chris

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