Better Perl

Paul Makepeace paulm at paulm.com
Fri Apr 11 19:16:17 BST 2008


On Fri, Apr 11, 2008 at 4:24 PM, Jonathan Peterson
<JPeterson at bmjgroup.com> wrote:
> > Paul Makepeace wrote:
>  > > On 4/7/08, David Cantrell <david at cantrell.org.uk> wrote:
>  > >>
>  > >>> Any perl businesses with multi-<s>billion</s> million, even,
>  > dollar valuations?
>  > >>  >
>  > >>  > Morgan Stanley doesn't count :-)
>
>  FWIW, I had a chat with my local tame recruitment agent. His view of the
>  world was:
>
>  Python - little or no demand, only had one python job in the last month

http://idletogether.com/python-to-be-the-future-of-web-languages/

Interesting to see how/if that changes.

>  Ruby - small but growing noticeably, had 4-5 in the last month
>  PHP - big and growing fast, and has had several 'good' (his words) Java
>  devs switch to PHP recently. Some large outfits now actively recruiting
>  'real' programmers and asking them to use PHP.

Hardly a surprise, it's a great choice for writing web apps. It gets
the job done. Sure, it's not pretty, and in some places is downright
ugly but it gets the job done like _no_ other language: simplicity &
ease of deployment.

I see a lot of parallels between PHP and MySQL  - attracts plenty of
scorn from the ivory towers while getting on with the job of powering
most of the web and making its users a metric fkton of $$. Also like
MySQL in that it gradually morphed into a pretty decent product that
the ivory towers are grudgingly running out of reasons to criticise
(presumably while still debating how to get their dusty PostgreSQL
instance to actually replicate...)

>  Java - big and static, waiting to see what effect the (highly probable)
>  city layoffs will have in a month or two's time.
>  Perl - small and static (4-5 / month), still used by a small number of
>  very big companies, who seem to account for most of it.

Seems that way here.

P

>  This sample is from one of the big 5 agencies, but only the north-central
>  London area, which is heavily dominated by publishing and (traditional)
>  media companies.
>
>  Make of it what you will. Most interesting I thought was his belief that
>  people who previously would have written off PHP were now attempting to
>  use it, but to use it like a proper language.
>
>  My recent playing with Ruby came to griding halt whan I noticed it STILL
>  didn't do unicode. Also, if you look at Ruby's Net::SMTP and Perl's
>  Net::SMTP Perl's is just so much nicer - better documentation, better
>  designed, does more stuff. It really shows what an extra decade of
>  maturity means.


>
>  J
>
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