On Thu, Jan 31, 2013 at 09:51:54PM +0100, Richard Foley wrote: > It's sad, but it's true: > > Developers/Engineers like to think their creation is so cool, OBVIOUSLY > everyone's going to buy one. This is/was Apple's approach. > > Sales people don't care about their product quality or usefulness, so long as > everyone buys one. This is/was Microsoft's approach. > > 'Nuff said.
I disagree on that last paragraph. Because, Microsoft is a commercial organisation. The problem it is trying to optimise is "how to make more money", which means selling more stuff (or the same stuff for more money) Whereas Perl is an open source creation. People are doing it to solve other problems. And, who is doing the marketing for Linux? After all, it's doing rather well on servers, and portable devices. [And, 10 years ago, who would have thought that the mobile phone platform wars would have been between a BSD variant, and Linux derivative? :-)] On Thu, Jan 31, 2013 at 03:23:14PM -0500, eash...@mac.com wrote: > > > Perl was originally built to beat out scripting alternatives so this is > > fairly logical. > > Actually, no, it wasn't. It was built by one guy to solve a problem that one > or more combinations of existing tools did not. I think pulling the > 'marketing' vector won't succeed any more now than it has in the past, mostly > because it eventually lacks the enthusiasm that only a few really can attain. > And popularity is rarely an indicator of quality. > > Perhaps the question might be better asked, what does C, and even moreso > Java, have that perl apparently lacks. I'd like to stress that Science is repeatable, whereas stuff you make up is not. ie http://blog.timbunce.org/2008/04/12/tiobe-or-not-tiobe-lies-damned-lies-and-statistics/ but the most recent dump that emerged from the dark areas of Tiobe suggested that C is more whatever-it-is-that-they-claim-it-is than Java So, somehow, C's marketing is better than Java (and all the rest) Which is strange, as C is far less trendy than Java, decades older, missing a bunch of enterprise buzzwords, easier to screw up, not what universities are churning out, etc And who is marketing C? Who is making money from selling it? Which, I think, is Elaine's point. C is doing something right. Without actually trying. Or at least, without trying to fake it. Nicholas Clark PS The article is poor. It fails to claim that Python is going nowhere because the current RHEL ships 2.6.6. Which would be only fair, given what they comment about Perl. PPS Note, 2.6.6, not 2.6.8. Either RHEL's numbers lie, or RHEL has failed to keep up with 2 CVEs: http://www.python.org/getit/releases/2.6.8/
