Is Perl *that* good? (was: How's ruby compare to it older bro

[Peter Hansen]

jwsacksteder at ramprecision.com wrote:

> I suspect the perl is the first place many people get exposed
> to regexes and when they understand the utility of that, some 
> of the glow rubs off on perl. Someone actually said to me 
> once "I program in perl because I can't live without regex."
> Now when someone says "perl text-processing", I hear "regex".
> (If I was motivated, I would include the above substitution in
>  regex notation here...)
> 
> The php/mysql crowd gives me this feeling as well, but that's
> a discussion for another day and another list.

I guess it would be interesting to pose the question back to
them "If you could not use regexes in Perl, would you still
like to program in it?" or "If you couldn't use mysql in PHP
would you still use it?"

What similar question, if any, would be a difficult one for
us Python types?

-Peter