[EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote:
> Turoff, Adam (lists.advocacy):
> >The next question that comes to me is, "How do we turn the tables on
> >Java and refocus the conversation on Perl's Dark Matter -- Perl users
> >who don't identify with being programmers?"
>
> I'm being a little slow, but what do you mean with your last phrase? -
> users of Perl, (part-time programmers, if you like) or users of Perl
> programs. (end users)
Librarians who do a little bit of HTML and CGI maintenance on an
online catalog.
Graphic designers who do a small amount of tweaking Perl programs
that someone else has written, and eventually learn enough to write
small CGI programs from scratch.
C/C++ programmers who occasionally need to beat a webserver into
submission with the odd Perl hack.
None of these people consider themselves Perl programmers, and
two of three in this list don't identify with being programmers
at all. Perl is a very useful tool that they'll use occasionally.
If the second type of user were important (and I agree, it's not)
then the hyperbole can begin pretty much immediately: count all
of the people who read slashdot or any other dynamically generated
content on the web as "end users of Perl programs". That number
goes from 0 to 60 million in a few milliseconds. :-)
> And I think the way to do that is more
> testimonials of the form "We had this problem, I sat down and wrote
> some Perl, and it was the easiest way to solve it" - things that come
> from, as my esteemed publishers are so fond of saying, "Programmer to
> Programmer".
Very good point.
All of this talk about enterprise apps being written in Perl is
beginning to seem like a distraction. The point isn't to rewrite
Oracle in Perl. The point is to get Perl integrated into Oracle.
And it's not about the endless parade of complete software packages
written in Perl (shrink-wrapped or not, "enterprise quality" or not),
but the endless parade of "Perl worked, it worked quickly, and nothing
else did" stories. That's the Perl way. Focusing on apps written
in Perl is tacitly adopting the Java way.
Z.
