Well, I worked my butt off today and of course I missed out on being on top of lots of good posts today. So, since everybody has beaten this topic to death some 7 hours later, I thought I would take a different approach.

Ovid - I hate to say it, but those arguments are pretty damned valid. If I were in your shoes, I would stick it out - just because you are in Amsterdam. It can't be __THAT__ bad. Amsterdam!

Let me tell the story of the pre-Perl jeffa - (crickets chirp lightly in background) . . .

I started out after graduating with a CS major at a Mircosoft Shop as a 'consultant' where

$truth{'consultant'} = 'junior programmer';
[download]

I programmed in Visual Basic6, studied for MS Certifications, and thought I was doing OK. The Shop shopped me out to a client to finish a second revisioning of VB-Oracle app, originally started by a newbie VB programmer. If you think the code that newbie Perl programmers come up with is a bit convoluted, check out the VB newbies.

Anyways, I worked on that project for about 3 months. Sometime around the last month, one of my fellow 'consultants' who was assigned to the same client asked me if I knew awk. I said, why not use Perl. So, next thing I knew, I had written a Perl script that parsed his data.

The bug bit me. I hadn't written Perl in about a year. I remembered how powerful Perl was with it's regular expression engine brandished before it like a Paladin's Holy Sword.

Two months later I found myself programming in Perl for a dot com.

So, my point is: sometimes we have to do something else to appreciate how much we really love what we did. Ovid, think of having to program in VBScript as a catalyst that will make you really appreciate your next gig with Perl.

And most importantly - enjoy your stay in Amsterdam.

Jeff

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