I listened to an interview last night with Perl guru Randal Schwartz. He said that Perl is meant for people who use the language at least two or three hours per week. If you’re not going to use it that often, you’re probably better off using something else. But if you use it full time, you can see huge productivity increases.
That matches my experience, at least the first part. I was attracted to Perl because I could imagine being very productive with it. At first I used the language infrequently. Every time I sat down to write Perl I had to work hard to reload the language into my brain. Then for a while I used it frequently enough to achieve some fluency. Then as I wrote Perl less often I could almost feel the language slipping away.
Of course you have to use any language, human or computer, to achieve and maintain fluency. But my sense is that Perl requires more frequent use than other programming languages in order to remain minimally competent, and it repays frequent use more than other languages. I imagine this is a consequence of the natural language principles baked into the language.
One of the things I prefer about Python is that you do not have to use it three hours a week to remain competent.
I no longer write Perl, but I still enjoy listening to thought-provoking Perl speakers like Randal Schwartz.
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Randal L. Schwartz 01.31.08 at 20:29
Thanks for noticing my comment about Perl. Yeah, I stand by that assessment. Perl probably has a greater spread from beginner to expert than almost any other language, simply because it’s optimized for the experts.
John 02.01.08 at 07:32
Thanks. “Spread from beginner to expert” is a good way to summarize what I was trying to say.
Codewiz51 06.08.08 at 20:25
John,
I use C++ almost exclusively in my current job. I find I have to use it eight hours a day and I still forget 90% of what I learned yesterday.
So don’t feel bad about not writing perl. You’ll find a reason to get back to it one day. It’s just such a perfect language for extraction and reporting.
Gene
Aaron 02.18.09 at 19:56
I agree with Randall, having recently gotten back into Perl, and essentially having to re-learn it. But, I’d forgotten all my bad habits from before, and feel I’m a much better Perl programmer now. I really only wasted time looking at the myriad of unnecessary (and unnecessarily bizarre) OO frameworks proliferating in Perl these days, which almost sent me running into the arms of Python — which I’ve never used seriously, but still feel I could be comfortable with on day one.
I thought Randall Schwartz was proclaiming Smalltalk exclusively these days?