Does Microsoft like Perl and PHP????

[Jonathan Stowe]

On Sun, 2007-10-14 at 22:16 +0100, Lyle - CosmicPerl.com wrote:
> Hi All,
>   I've been reading through a load of stuff. What's going on with 
> Microsoft and other script engines, I just read this review on Perl from 
> their site:-
> http://msdn2.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ms974552.aspx
> And I've been reading about them working with Zend to produce their 
> FastCGI IIS extension that's going to launch with IIS7, and is available 
> for IIS5 and 6 as a download from their site....
> 

Microsoft have had a long relationship with Perl - they funded the port
of an early 5.0001 to windows by HIP communications ( a predecessor of
Activestate) so they could put it in the Windows NT Resource kit, I
believe they also provide some small support more recently to improve
certain features on Windows.

There are lots of useful and quite up to date examples of Perl at
http://www.microsoft.com/technet/scriptcenter/scripts/perl/default.mspx
and other domain specific examples scattered across msdn.

More recently they may have slightly alienated the Perl community with
the "Dynamic Language Runtime" with support for Python and Ruby - of
course this wasn't deliberate on Microsoft's part, it's just that work
was already underway to have those languages run on the CLR. You can
search the archives of this list for a flavour of the positions that
would make Perl running there unlikely.

As Andy indicated Microsoft have no reason to be other than language
agnostic, they will certainly promote their own language products for
application development but as they sell the tools that they make money
from it's not particularly surprising, however they are also acutely
savvy to the fact that individuals and enterprises have their own
language preferences (and prejudices) and it would be a mistake to
thoroughly alienate them if they want to sell as many copies of their OS
as they can.

/J\