>Perl is still struggling to find its ecological niche. You're not going to
>write a device driver in it, or a windowing system, or an air traffic
>control center. No-one would get in trouble for picking C++ for those, but
>that's okay; Perl doesn't have to be all things to all people.
>
>At some stage, however, we oughtta acknowledge that a language with as many
>features as Perl is too big to be considered only for programs of under 100
>lines. Something with that much capability oughtta to be a candidate for
>complex tasks. The prime niche here is enterprise-wide systems: product
>management chains, document management systems, process control, CRM, ERP,
>etc. These things don't have to bit-twiddle or require pedal-to-the-metal
>optimization, they should be coded at the kind of '30,000 feet view' that
>Perl gives you, and need to interface easily with HTTP, databases, XML, etc.
There is a web-development framework written in Perl that has been
developed by a private company (we are trying to convince them to release
the product open source) that is over 100,000 lines of code and still
growing. The program is feature rich (unfortunately not well documented at
this point in time), as far as I can tell the fastest thing on the planet,
and all around pretty amazing. Also, the Federal Reserve Board has some
pretty hairy programs written in Perl. So, it can be used for large
applications but is not the program of choice for large distributed
programming environments for reasons that "Abigail" eloquently stated
previously.
A group in Agilent Technologies used Perl to develop their CADDATA Store
web site written entirely in Perl and is pretty snappy (of course they have
some big iron behind the site which helps of course).
So Perl is used frequently in some very large applications but those apps
are just not marketed very well. A killer web development framework just
might be the "killer" app Perl needs.
Anyway, we are continuing to prowl around looking for really cool useages
of Perl. We did publish a little booklet already with a dozen of those
stories and Betsy Waliszewski is heading up that effort at O'Reilly (and it
is not a small undertaking...believe me....) and if you know of any more
really cool (especially if its big and used by a big company or developed
by a big company as a product that people are using) please send them her
way ([EMAIL PROTECTED]).
We'll keep championing Perl (our research group uses it every day) so long
as there is a Perl to champion, its just that we are beginning to see the
Java steamroller beginning to rumble over everything in its path including
Perl.
Madeline Schnapp
Director of Market Research
O'Reilly and Associates
101 Morris Street, Sebastopol, CA 95472
Tel: 707-829-0515, FAX: 707-829-0104
email: [EMAIL PROTECTED], URL: http://www.oreilly.com
