when Oracle bought Sun many analysts speculated that Oracle will sell Sun Hardware Division, of course even more analysts speculated the obvious which is, Oracle is taking a dive into the hardware business
When I read this all i was thinking was, Mark Hurd seems like a hardware guy, Oracle really wants to get this hardware business right!
Well, the main problem I have with this idea is the assumption that all Programming is equal! Which is not.
It is easy to write a simple program that concatenate 2 files for examples, it is also easy to create a CRUD database application
Systems programming on the other hand is hard, because to be good at it, you need to understand how the systems work, which is hard, and by hard I mean you need to do a lot of reading and remember many details
I believe Programming is as hard & complex as the Programming Problem domain.
Programming itself is not hard, because concepts like Iteration, functions, conditional branching, recursion, OOP (Inheritance, encapsulation, polymorphism ), etc ... are not that complex, are they?
Perl Pros:
1. It have every feature you may need in a language and them some
2. The best community ever (i know subjective but ... i am sure most ppl will agree with me on this)
3. CPAN (I wonder why other languages never was able to beat perl in this area)
Perl Cons:
1. Many feature are hard to learn and use
If you want to learn the relational model using a fairly slim book, i cant recommend "Practical Issues in Database Management" by Fabian Pascal enough for you!
And always remember, relational theory is one thing, and popular RDBMS is another.
A real TV with some new unconventional features might make it though