Bonkers

[Andy Armstrong]

On 4 May 2007, at 12:55, Nicholas Clark wrote:
> If not, lets have some de-lurking. Because without it nothing is  
> going to
> improve.**

In the last five years I've been paid for working with

Visual Basic
C
C++
PHP
HTML
JavaScript
Java

I haven't (nominally) been paid to write a single line of Perl -  
although I've certainly used Perl in just about every project I touch.

I have mixed feelings like that. I'd love to be working on an / 
interesting/ Perl project but I'd hate (because I'm stupid and  
precious about things I should probably get over) to work on a  
crufty, smelly one.

I'd rather take a smelly PHP job than a smelly Perl job.

Clients know that when they send me some bizarro data in a less-than- 
ideal format I seem to be able to quickly turn it into something  
useful. What they don't know is that behind the curtain is Perl.

I feel as if I'm letting Perl down by squandering the magic like that.

It's not a problem for me: I'm not prepared to work away from home,  
move or take a permanent position. I aim to do just enough paid work  
that I can afford to dick around with interesting things most of the  
time and mostly I get away with it.

But I can certainly see a problem for Perl in that. In architectural  
terms it puts Perl in the pencil case rather than on the drawing board.

Shit like this doesn't help of course:
   http://avatraxiom.livejournal.com/58084.html

(via http://use.perl.org/%7Echromatic/journal/33191)

I've heard the same fud when I've proposed using Perl for anything  
major - basically anything that actually needs to be designed,  
specified. "It's not maintainable", "It's not type safe[1]", "Regular  
expressions scare me".

I've no idea what to do about any of this.

[1] Often from people who don't have clue 1 what that actually means.

-- 
Andy Armstrong, hexten.net