Perl

I happen to enjoy perl alot, in fact the place im currently working at uses perl to keep the server alive. We have a perl program that will run each night automatically calling batch files and other perl programs to back up the hardrives, analyze the logs of the hits that day, and other time consuming tasks. Its easy to learn, and a lot of support behind it.

So what can perl do besides creating webpages? Well, like i mentioned before there is a lot of support behind it, so it can really do anything you need it to. Of course programming games wouldnt be a wise use of it, and i wouldnt recommend enbedding it in your game as a scripting system, but other than that its all good. Perl can be enbedded with c (without too much headaches) and can basically do everything a normal language can without the need for compiling everything. If your interested in checking it out quickly, visit www.activestate.com, which has an easy to set up windows specific version of perl called activeperl.

text processing. If you have any text files you need processing, perl is good at doing that. That means any text files. Some types of text files include:

[your favourite language] source files,
webpages,
xml documents,
websites (spiders).

It is also good for pattetn matching. Perl is being used extensively for bioinfomatics. This includes but is not limited to finding patterns in chromosomes and genes.

In short, Perl is one of a few languages that are very very good at datamining. By no means is it obsolete.

Perl is a very cute language. As mentioned it can do a lot of things in one line that with C++ would take many.

-- Steve --

Learn it, it''s somewhat strange, but once you get good with it, youre code will be extremily condensed and nearly impossible to read by others (which is good for you and bad for them, oh well). Its got dozens of neat little tricks to make coding quick.

Perl I wouldn''t call "cute" =). It''s probably the most successful scripting language out there beyond shell scripts.

Perl has more module support than most other scripting languages (Python catching up). Odds are someone has written some module for some obscure function or protocol you need to access. Most of the modules are written in C to provide speed as well.

Perl is probably the language of choice for most web sites, esp now people are moving away from IIS. It''s got great text processing capabilities built into the default language set.

Perl is ugly. Most perl programmers aren''t disciplined enough to write clean Perl code, too many shortcuts are way to fun and easy to use.

There is no way Perl is considered obsolete. Perl is still probably the big boy on the block for scripting languages. Python seems to have started a counter-revolution, but to be honest, both have pluses and minuses. And in most cases, users learn both and then decide which they like to use.

Interim