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In Babu Srinivasan’s discussion on the topic of what programming language could theoretically be the the sweetest choice—If you have to learn just one programming language—we see decent coverage of the concerns involved. What we also see, however, is the same reflexive, fact-depleted dismissal of Perl based on third hand complaints by second rate hackers. …many people consider it to be line noise… If you have to learn just one programming language This is what is technically known as weasel-words. There’s more where that came from. He points out that Perl is strictly a legacy language now; no new software being written in it. For example the BBC’s new iPlayer which runs on the same Perl framework Sedition·com does was written via time machine by hackers who travelled to the past where Perl is still in use. What really burns is that I know what readers think when they read the article. No one is convinced by his conclusion because he doesn’t pick C#, Ruby, Java, or Python. So all those guys are going, “Oh, that’s totally right. Perl sucks and all the others are losers too except for (C#|Ruby|Java|Python), the lingo in which I hack. He just didn’t get the bigger picture. Of course (C#|Ruby|Java|Python) is the right choice.” Anyway, the closer is: “Scala wins and here’s an example of why: >.” Go look at it. Then come back and look at this–