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?"

Comments

Wrong Person, Not Language

[Washizu]

Typically these jobs that take weeks instead of hours are assigned to the wrong people, not the wrong language. The right person should figure out the best solution for the problem and tackle the problem correctly. The wrong person will go after it in his favorite language and ignore the best way if it includes any amount of work before he begins coding.

Re:IT's called a standard

[Sebastopol]

No kidding!

We had an intern who wrote a bunch of stuff in Python and Ruby. He was all gung-ho on those languages and made a big deal about how they were "it". When he left, no one had the time to learn how to support these languages, so we ended up re-writing them in Perl so that everyone could support them.

FYI: his scripts sucked, too. He'd make lots of dumb mistakes like assigning a variable called "retval" and then checking "ret"!!! Duh. gcc would have caught this immediately, so would "use strict".

Re:PHP scripting/coding/whatever

[MikeFM]

The problem is programmers that are insecure because they aren't confident in their ability to move between languages as needed. Programmers usually have their favorite tools for any given job but the ones that get really nasty are the programmers that are only comfortable with the few tools they use.

For me I'm pretty confident in my ability so I can move between any language that exists or is just invented as the job goes along (happens sometimes) so I don't especially get snotty. Python is one of my favorites but it certainly isn't perfect. I have done a lot in PHP but have grown unhappy with it for large projects. It is good for small to medium sized projects. Java is okay for programs that are going to run on servers with lots of memory and that won't be restarting the program often but is to heavy for most of the things I do. C/C++/Asm are good for low level stuff that needs to be fast but IMO should not be used for the bulk of things they get used for.