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Do Scripters Suffer Discrimination?
TheTheologian writes "In his InfoWorld column, Chad Dickerson says 'there is a level of quiet discomfort between the "scripting" versus "programming" factions in some corporate development environments in which I have participated. In some instances, executive-level technology management has held scripting languages in disdain as not being "real" languages for day-to-day problem solving, which has discouraged highly talented scripters on staff from practicing their craft. In such an environment, scripters are relegated to the lower ranks ... ' He goes on to say that some companies will assign Java and C++ programmers tasks that take them weeks but could be done by Perl or Python programmers in a few hours. Is it true that some companies are so overcome with code bias they'd assign weeks of unnecessary work rather than give it to the scripting untouchables?"
A good programmer who knows his perl may be able to replace a lengthy C/C++ program with a few lines of perl, but what happens when that programmer moves on?
To the untrained eye, perl looks like line noise, and may be rather difficult to maintain. Admittedly, perl is rather popular, but suppose that a programmer decides that lisp, haskell, or intercal is apropriate to the job at hand?
you wanna pick up somebody's perl code (or even your own) six months later?
My problem? I was perfectly gruntled, until some numbnuts came by and dissed me.
First, I would suggest that [long winded arrogance] means you either didn't listen to or didn't understand what your friend was saying. And PHP's short path to hell is not loose types, but its' (early versions, mind you, and therefore most of the installed base) over-reliance on GLOBAL FUCKING VARIABLES. This can be the short path to hell with Perl, too, which is why we have the "use strict" pragma, as well as locals.