Having the appropriate amount of fun
I’m learning Perl in the evenings. This is slightly mad, given the amount of stuff I’ve got on at the moment, but heyâwhat’s a geek to do? I’d been thinking about learning a new language (properly this time, none of that ‘just learning enough to write this program that I needed yesterday’ business) for some time, and had a number of different possibilities lined up. I had a slightly half-hearted attempt at Python some time ago, and I’ve also considered the merits of Ruby, but in the end I settled for Perl. There are pros and cons with all languages, of course (I have no doubt that someone will argue vociferously that I made the wrong choice), but Perl seems to have the benefit of being very widely used (indeed, this very post is managed by a sophisticated collection of Perl scripts), and there’s a lot of documentation and support available, in the guise of Perl Monks and Perl Mongers.
