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Through recent years I have seen a trend growing stronger where those languages and tools are noted "good" which are easier to learn by those who are new "coders". Many of these languages have turned out to be quite promising, still, I never could convince myself that easily learnable languages could be better just because of the fact that lame newbies can quickly throw together some bug-full unusable crap which they can call software and themselves coders in a day. I think that it's not always bad to have a necessary learning curve since it can teach the coder many things about the particular language. And on the other hand, quickly learning some highlevel language won't make anyone a good coder in a night's time. Not even a week. And if you know what I'm talking about you also know that having a strong basis knowledge can make one able to learn new languages very quickly and able to adapt also very quickly. Thus, the easyness of a new language plays a very minor role when judging its viability.

And with this I have arrived to the point where I have to tell that I think Perl is and has been one of the most usable and handy tools over the last very many years. It's one of those scripting languages which I use for many years now on multiple platforms with great satisfaction. Of course, good coders always use the best tool for a given goal, and while Perl (as phyton, ruby, sometimes even php) can be used to solve quite a wide range of problems, there are certainly many areas where one'd better pick another tool, e.g. there's nothing hard in coding a web server in perl or in phyton or in ruby, I still wouldn't do it, unless explicitly wanted and paid for

Perl is a great languge, still I'd never compare it to j2ee or .net-related languages, even the idea seems wierd. I've also read recently some articles about ruby's superiority and why it should be used and everything else dropped (including php), and I always came to the same conclusion: most of these people who write these "article" don't know their subjects more than some ignorant nut gardner just released from an assylum trying to learn space eva security protocols.

I hope Perl will be a long time more around, and I'm happy that I have the tools (Perl included, among many others) which can sometimes make my coding life so much easier. I wouldn't waste too much time in comparing apples to oranges, or to [uselessly] find out whether a crocodile is longer or greener ?