I had a chance to catch up on some SAGE email and found a thread on the relative complexity of scripts vs. programs that sysadmins write. This is one of the things I've been thinking about lately but haven't had time to write about. There were times at AV that I was disrespected because I wrote a substantial amount of Perl code. Some people acted as if the code was trivial because Perl is a scripting language, as opposed to C or Java. I've also encountered this attitude on some interviews.

The truth of the matter is that a highly complex piece of software can be written in a scripting language, and a totally trivial one-liner can be written in a compiled, linked, or virtual machine language. Why anyone should think or act otherwise (especially another software engineer) is beyond me.