I believe you Mike - without a foundation in OOP, Perl IS easier to learn
and use.  But I have heard a lot of horror stories about people either
trying to pick up someone else's Perl script and rewriting it (what a
total waste of time) or going back to a script they wrote a while back and
not understanding either what they wanted to do, why they did it the way
they did, or even how the script works.  My best scenario for Perl - the
simpler the task, the simpler the script, the better off you are using
Perl.  Imho, Perl, just like every other tool, has its place.  

On Mon, 24 Jul 2000, you wrote: 
> My 2 cents: > I AM a newbie (just askDavid), and I think Perl is still the way 
> to go. I have picked up bookson Python (O'Reilly), and still found 
> myself turning to Perl because Ifound it easier to understand. 
> 
> The selection of modules at CPAN is enormous (sp?), and there is a good
> chance you will find one for the task you need to do (er um, I'm still
> havin' a tough time finding something for SQL7). In fact, I had a need to
> be able to generate graphs from MySQL queries, and  whatta ya know, CPAN
> had the modules I needed (although I had a dickens of a time getting
> GDGraph to go).
> 
> My advice, play with them all. Find the one that makes most sense to YOU.
> Then take the ball and run :-)
> 
> Mike
> mgcon@getnet.com
> http://www.getnet.com/~mgcon
> Phoenix, AZ
> USA
> 
> 
> 
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-- 
Jim

Zope is cool!