Help me to be more biased towards Perl (or not)

[Nicholas Clark]

On Fri, May 11, 2007 at 09:33:03AM +0100, Aaron Trevena wrote:
> On 11/05/07, Ian Docherty <londonperlmongers at iandocherty.com> wrote:
> >My fear is that if the project is out-sourced I may be over-ruled by our
> >directors who are impressed by flashy presentations from these external
> >companies that have good reasons to develop this web application in
> >either Java or dot-net (because that is what *they* are biased towards).
> >
> >Once the project is done I still have to think about supporting the
> >resulting code-base.
> >
> >So, should I be concerned? Are there good arguments either for or
> >against Perl? I know most people here will be biased towards Perl but
> >are there any objective arguments I can use?
> 
> Yes, you should be concerned  --
> If you don't know Java you really don't want to be supporting it - a 1
> week course isn't going to be enough for you to get beyond fixing very
> trivial problems and changes - and maintaining legacy Java of a low
> standard without very good knowledge of Java style, practices, etc
> would be very unpleasent.

How many people would your company have to retrain to Java to support the
new site? Or .NET? Versus how much (or little) training would be needed to
cross train the current people to Perl?

[Assumption here being that it's easier to cross from PHP to Perl than from
PHP to Java. But you'll need to find slightly more than my zero facts to
back this up]

> If you could produce a shortlist of agencies that can produce
> something that you can support, that would be good - just make usage
> of Perl that you're fairly familiar or happy with a requirement and
> you should be able to get 3 or 4 consultancies able to come forward
> and they'll probably be cheaper than the 'enterprise java' shops.

Support is key. But logically this should lead to agencies that make it in
PHP, if no other spin is applied.

Nicholas Clark