techno.blog("Dion")

Mike Spille has come out of the closet. No, nothing to do with gay marriages… he is a Perlaphobe.

I suffer from the same disease. My symptoms are slightly different though. There was a period of my life where I was an addict. I had jumped from the gates of C/C++ and was drinking the perl juice for a couple of years. I joined the cult of CPAN where people shared their wares, and a quick search would find the code you needed. I wrote JAPH scripts. I was caught hanging out with Tom Christiansen and Randall Schwartz. I remember raising money for Randall’s lawyers.

Although I got out of this world, I still miss it. I have reasons to work with perl from time to time. Yup, perl is involved in the running of TheServerSide (there are only a few PURELY “one language” applications out there: we use Java, perl, sh, cmd, sql, xml/xsl, …) and there is something “fun” about hacking in it again. I can just get so much done in a short time.

This is why I am excited about Groovy. I enjoy Ruby and Python… but have only had a few projects where I have had a chance to use them. With Groovy I can use the nice new syntax, but have access to all of the java libraries!