Better Perl

[Aaron Trevena]

On 04/04/2008, Jonathan Stowe <jns at gellyfish.com> wrote:
> On Fri, 2008-04-04 at 10:00 +0100, Aaron Trevena wrote:
>  > On 04/04/2008, Jonathan Tweed <jonathan at tweed.name> wrote:
>  > > > Perl still isn't dead, it's still kicking, and it will be around for a
>  > > > while.
>  > >  Just like COBOL.
>  >
>  > There really isn't any comparison.
>  >
>  > How many people are teaching themselves COBOL, how many people are
>  > building startups on COBOL, how many new open source projects were
>  > written or released in COBOL this year?
>
>
> That isn't a good comparison either - remember what the 'B' in COBOL
>  stands for.

Indeed. But it was just to counter the whole "no new people, new
projects, new startups" nonsense.

>  Also people keep mentioning "startups" in this thread and it is annoying
>  me, what has "startups" got to do with anything? There are a lot of
>  startups that don't use computers at all for their core business - like
>  ice cream shops and coffee bars and cleaning companies, except what
>  people mean by startups in this thread are crappy little web sites full
>  of vacuous ideas and rounded corners with no business plan, I don't
>  believe that is a clear indicator of anything - personally I'd rather
>  they'd all fuck off and do their stuff in PHP or whatever is fashionable
>  today and let the rest of us get on with writing code for businesses
>  that know what they are doing.

See above. Personally I agree.

My client is a startup (well, it has VC backing and is only a couple
of years old), PHP wouldn't be up to the job.

It's pretty big, #1 or #2 in most of it's markets, and I'm finding it
both a challenging and interesting job, mostly because high
load/traffic can result in behaviour and problems you don't see in
most run of the mill websites.

The real problems are a combination of too many new features too soon
and underinvestment in hardware/staff in relation to both predicted
and actual growth - but in a VC-backed startup that's nearly always
the case (too slow to grow - you die, too slow to add new features -
you die, focussing on anything other than growing fast - you run out
of funding before the revenue covers the costs).

A.

-- 
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