On Thu, May 17, 2001 at 07:39:06AM -0600, Nathan Torkington wrote:
> http://www.zdnet.com/zdnn/stories/comment/0,5859,2717377,00.html
Interesting:
A few years back, I needed to perform some data analysis on several
gigabytes of Web server logs. I had neither the time or the
inclination to write the necessary tool in C or C++. I remembered
that Perl was actually an acronym for Practical Extraction and
Reporting Language, so I did a little research, downloaded Perl,
trial-and-errored my first Perl script, and crunched the logs my
way before the day was out.
Now this is what I call productivity.
Sounds like a story I heard at a show recently. Someone came by the
ActiveState booth, mostly to say thanks. I talked to him a bit about
his Perl usage, and he said that he was working somewhere using a very
buzzword compliant OLAP package.
The vendor was singing the praises of his software, talking about
all of it's features, the benefits of using his product, etc. He
ended his presentation by saying something like:
"...but if you want to do some *serious* data crunching,
just use a little Perl."
Funny, I thought OLAP *was* serious data crunching. :-)
> I love the feedback, which seems to have a lot of LISP huggers. :-)
You must mean this article (using LISP as a competitive advantage):
http://www.paulgraham.com/lib/paulgraham/pgtalk-rev2.pdf
http://www.paulgraham.com/lib/paulgraham/sec.txt
The last two paragraphs, he talks about his competative advantage
running ViaWeb (now Yahoo! Stores) as a LISP shop. He'd size up
the job descriptions for his competitors. C++ and Java shops with
a lot of IT buzzwords didn't pose a threat, but the ones looking
for Perl and Python programmers he found to be "frightening".
Z.
