Re: @Charlie Clark - Why exactly is Perl any worse than Python?
The more accurate analogy is that some of us just need to drive, while others of us know how to build a car engine as well. I'd rather rely on engineers to do the latter while making sure the engine is efficient and safe and is capable of getting us from a to b. On top of that, we have an easy-to-understand interface to allow us to actually drive and get ourselves where we need to go.
Frankly, writing a simple web page or a script to grab a list of users out of Active Directory/LDAP by criteria shouldn't require ops people like me (the mechanics in this scenario - we fix the crap that people use and sometimes perform upgrades or add features) to spend years of studying programming to perform a relatively simple task. Tasks that actual devs would be bored to tears doing. And in the case of systems operations, they are often not great with the application stack as it gets used either - a engineer isn't necessarily a good driver. The amount of devs who apparently have never heard of an LDAP filter or how construct an efficient search query never fails to grind my gears.
For your financial system or air traffic control system, sure, you want to design a bespoke engine with custom components and capabilities tuned to specific requirements and the underlying environment.
Biting the hand that feeds IT
