Tom Christiansen [tchr...@chthon.perl.com] quoth: *>more conceptual blindspots. It's like knowing how to boil but not *>fry. Programming is not a skill one develops in five easy lessons.

Indeed. But, what is it about Perl that attracts the sort of mythology it has? Splitting the hairs of reality aside, the perception of people who either haven't used it or have only dabbled is that it's bloated, inefficient, hard to learn, obfuscated, hard to maintain, etc.

A rather bright engineer here recently commented that "Perl is not for production code, period." and he has never actually used the language. How can you defend Perl to someone who is in a policy making position, is stubborn and has this perception of Perl he has picked up from the net, colleagues, etc.? You can't.

I'm using more shell and awk than I have in years these days.