>>24
I would have learned quite a bit faster had my C compiler not spewed ungodly numbers of errors as I tried to figure out how to get casting to work. Perl's typeless system would have allowed me to gloss over the type drivel and focus on design - which I can apply to any languague. Then, once I had design down, I could go and learn the nitty-gritty bits of whatever language I am using, in order to make it efficient.
Both have their place.
I suggest checking out CPAN if you think Perl is a write-once language. There are many mature modules out there, and quite actively maintained. Unit tested, tinderboxed, etc.
Any language can be write once. I have seen (and currently maintain) 5000 line C# functions, because the person who wrote the C# was a tard. It would have been the same in Perl - unmaintainable crap. Blame the programmer, not the tool. Any language can be made to suck. Some just make you get creative in how badly you suck.
ANother C# example - guy at my work has a typed collection class. Great, except it has a function called DisplayCollection. Yes, this is present on the server - so some moron will eventually be popping up dialog boxes on the remoting server. Also, he puts a try-catch-throw around every chunk of code, so he can debug into it easier through the IDE. Don't even get me started on the GUI designer code ... that looks worse than most Perl code - even the crap. Oh yeah, and the collection class also has a QueryCollection method ... and that gets sent to clients, which dont have oracle drivers. Can't wait to see the day that a client barfs up an error about not being able to connect to the database.