[OT] perl and CLRs

[Nicholas Clark]

On Wed, May 02, 2007 at 12:33:41PM +0100, Peter Hickman wrote:

> And porting Perl to .NET will help? The real problem, and why we are 

I don't think that it will.

> moving from Perl to Java here, is that Universities train people to be 
> at least competent in Java and therefore we can recruit staff. Perl 
> tends to be self taught and the number of people interested enough in 
> computing to teach themselves a language is much smaller than the demand 
> for programmers. Porting Perl to .NET will not change anything, 

I don't think that it will change anything for exactly these reasons.

And the economics make sense, if Perl is not sufficiently more productive
that it overcomes the cost of cross training people.

> especially if they can play with something like Ruby which is available 
> on the JVM and .NET.

You seem to contradict yourself here slightly.
Your statement implies that if Perl *were* available for .NET and JVM
(which is a logical extension of porting to .NET alone, albeit 75% more
work) then people might also play with Ruby.

> Languages die, get over it.

COBOL hasn't, sadly. I hope FORTRAN 77 does.

Nicholas Clark