Random Perl ... rant

[Peter Hickman]

Iain Barnett wrote:
> I like perl a lot, but I make more "direct" money through C#. It's a 
> good language with a good framework and a good IDE, on a rubbish OS. 
> If I compare perl, it's also a good language, with a good framework 
> (slightly better because it's driven by the community), on good and 
> bad OS's - but the killer blow is in the IDE's (for me).
>
> If you want to draw in programmers from other languages then you can't 
> show them a command line debugger and colorised emacs and expect 
> converts. I want intellisense, and I want a GUI for debugging, and so 
> do a lot of other people *because it makes us more productive and our 
> lives easier*, which is the whole point. Isn't it?
>
> I'm still looking forward to Perl6 though. Looks interesting, but I 
> can see it being in the same league as Lisp for number of users.
>
> Iain
>

I have a deep seated fear of languages that can't be worked from the 
command line and vi. When something goes arse up it is nice to be able 
to log into the live server with nothing more than vi and insert some 
debugging code and patch the bugs. It worries me that I have difficulty 
coding Java without Eclipse but at least I know than I can drop down to 
the command line to run the tests and builds from ant.

I really don't like being locked in to the tools and how the toolmaker 
dictates how I should do my job.

-- 
Peter Hickman.

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