When is disregarding another language's strengths a good thing?

Gee... just about anytime you aren't discussing language design or making comparisons. Which, in case you hadn't noticed, we weren't. We were talking about good ways to do things in Perl . (And, by "Perl", I mean the one people use for serious work now; not 6.)

Now, you may be thinking "I do perfectly fine without X in Perl.

You seemed to have missed the mark here. There are plenty of things from other languages that I miss in Perl. But I don't try to jerry-rig them in Perl just because they aren't there. I take the pragmatic approach, the path of least resistance, and do it the way that makes sense in the language I'm working with. (And that's a fair summary of the node to which you were replying.)

In other words, have you ever written in C, Java, or Javascript?

For the record, sure. All three. Far more in C than Java or (snort) JS. C++ too. And quite a bit of Python at one time. And some TCL. And Lisp. CLIPS. Fortran. Pascal. Basic. Various shells, of course. A tiny bit of Ada once (which, thankfully I've forgotten everything about except its god-forsaken verbosity.) And, more recently, yes: Ruby; which is, I agree, very nice indeed. (Nice enough, in fact, that by the time Perl6 come into its own, I'll probably have to be converted from Ruby.) But still, I won't be getting entirely away from Perl5 anytime soon.

-sauoq
"My two cents aren't worth a dime.";