Better Perl

[Zbigniew Lukasiak]

On Sun, Apr 6, 2008 at 6:11 PM, Jonathan Tweed <jonathan at tweed.name> wrote:
>
> On 4 Apr 2008, at 14:11, Greg McCarroll wrote:
>
>
> > On Fri, Apr 04, 2008 at 12:28:25PM +0000, Jonathan Tweed wrote:
> >
> > >
> > > So do I, but it's getting increasingly difficult to resist management
> pressure to move to other languages.
> > >
> > >
> >
> > What would help you? And please give me the list in point form as I am
> > a bear of very little brane.
> >
>
>  Some problems specific to $work:
>
>  * There is a lot of Perl here, unsurprisingly not all of it is good.
>  * We are hampered by eight year old front end infrastructure.
>  * A lot of managers now assume all Perl is like the worst of the front end.
>  * The people building the new infrastructure are Java proponents.
>  * The client side developers wanted PHP, possibly as an overreaction to the
> fact they've been overly limited by SSIs for 8 years.
>
>  And a few which aren't:
>
>  * It's hard to hire good people and getting harder.
>  * Perl is seen to be old and past it.
>  * Management see few other big places using Perl, therefore Perl is not
> seen as enterprise.
>  * You can't hire someone with the mindshare of ThoughtWorks to do Perl
> consultancy.
>
>  Perl is a tainted language here and it's going to be hard to shake that. As
> to how we go about fixing it? I don't know, but as a start:
>
>  * Proof that Perl works for other big companies.
>  * Radically improved presentation and PR. I mean, perl.org?
>  * A reason to learn Perl, something that makes Perl 'cool'.
>  * A community that isn't downright rude to newcomers (that doesn't apply to
> everyone ;-).
>
>  As far as I can see, if you aren't already a Perl programmer there's no
> reason to learn Perl. That's the biggest problem. Most of the business
> issues follow on from there.

Yeah - this is dead right.  This is the question - why someone new
should learn Perl?

I still believe that CPAN gives huge advantage to Perl programmers -
but you need to know a lot to get much out of it.  Perl turned a bit
too much elitist and both PHP and Rails show, in different ways, that
downscaling is important in getting marketshare.  The more I think
about them I see that they are disruptive (for Perl) in the sense of
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Disruptive_technology - scorned by the
established players for their 'cheapness' - but gaining huge
marketshare in the low end will let them later conquer the high end as
well.

>
>  Cheers
>  Jonathan
>



-- 
Zbigniew Lukasiak
http://brudnopis.blogspot.com/