Perl School 4: Database Programming with Perl and DBIx::Class

[Paul Makepeace]

On Thu, Feb 7, 2013 at 4:09 AM, Dave Cross <dave at dave.org.uk> wrote:
> I think the best programmers don't "stick with the language they know". I
> think they see a new language as largely a case of learning new syntax and
> enjoy having a number of languages to choose from so they can use the best
> one for each individual task.

I feel this is a well-worn trope but not actually how it works except
for possibly very small one-off projects. Learning and being
productive in a language is far more than just syntax; in fact that's
probably the easiest part since they're largely the same, unless
you're learning something radically different. By far the lion's share
of the work is the libraries, error messages, documentation, and
toolchain.

>From my own experience, if I'm day-to-day productive at a
being-paid-for-it level in say Perl, I tend to swap out a bunch of
Python knowledge. Sure, I can swap it in, but as ever there's quite a
cost to that. Spending one's day constantly referring to Stack
Overflow, Google, CPAN, and perldoc is workable but it's slow. Using
say Perl + JavaScript is do-able but it requires IME daily use of
both.

Conclusion: unless Language X was compellingly amazing at Task A I'd
do my best to solve Task A with Language I'm Most Familiar With These
Days.

Curious how others approach this.

Paul