--- "Bryan C. Warnock" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
> This seemed to stem from, and I quote, "They are a Microsoft shop and
> have
> been mandated not to do Perl."
>
> I couldn't get any more information as to who issued the mandate, or
> why.
> Has anyone in the advocacy world seen or heard of something like this
> before?
> Has Redmond been issuing these mandates, or hinting ("wink, wink,
> nudge,
> nudge") that they be issued?
As many on the list have already indicated, such a directive likely did
not come from Microsoft. Ironically, a colleauge of mine and I had this
conversation last night. Perl was not allowed at her company, and I'm
guessing that the reasons we uncovered are similar to what they
encountered. Basically:
1. No company, so noone to support the product
2. No company, so noone a manager can bully into adding feature (and
thus look important)
3. No company, so noone to take the manager out to lunch, give him/her
shirts, stress balls, etc.
4. Hard to learn.
5. It's on UNIX now, but what if we move to NT?
I think #2-3 are likely (knowing the company). #1 is a common complaint
against open source software. IMHO, it is a legitimate--if you need to
escallate to vendor support, that's hard. The common response is
"community of users," but that typically doesn't placate auditors, who
see it as bug-and-virus ridden shareware.
We debated #4--she said it was not accessable strait away. I disagreed,
though she did have a point--it is not the most intuitive thing in the
world. I respect her skills, so I don't think there is a knowledge
thing there. I think part of it is that Perl is often sold as something
that can solve a range of problems, and resembles "lots of things you
already know." However, it also has elements of lots of other stuff, so
the learning curve is much steeper than many people expect. For someone
who wants to get to work right away, it is disheartening. We both
agreed, though, that a "standard" language (C, Perl, etc.) is better
than a propritary one (DataGate, SAP's ABAP, etc.). You need to send
people to be trained on the latter, and are SOL if they move on; you
can find people who know the former.
I won't dignify #5 with a response.
Another possiblity--indepentent of my conversation with my friend:
perhaps their prior experience with Perl-on-MS was 4.036, such as
BigPerl. I know a few folks had isssues with that. If they did not
directly get burned with that, then perhaps they had some other
problems with it that tainted perl's name. Or perhaps something wasn't
as portable as expected. Or, the one person who knew perl left before
perl "made it big" (say, last 3-5 years).
Just my $0.02.
Cheers,
Charles
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