On Tue, Aug 14, 2001 at 12:50:26PM +0800, Stas Bekman wrote:
> What Perl misses is a single face. If you are a corporate body and want to
> enquiry about Perl, where would they go? www.perl.com? www.perl.org? what
> do they find there? nothing, that will answer their questions. All the
> current resources are targeted to those who know what they want, this is
> not the situation here. We are talking about those who don't know how and
> where.
If you are a corporate body and want to inquire about C, do you call
ANSI? Bell Labs? Dennis Ritchie? Richard Stallman? Companies don't
"inquire about" C. They did in the days of K&R, when there wasn't any
comprehensive manual that corresponded to an actual compiler. They
were tracking a moving target.
I submit that Perl will be uncontroversial as an implementation
language just around the time that people stop expecting new versions
of the language*. Quick -- what version of C does your company support?
Should we be _making_ Perl anybody's first choice language for any
particular application? How about encouraging wise decision-making in
choosing software tools? There's no ANSI-like standard for Perl, and
for some organizations, that's a legitimate reason not to bank on Perl.
I'm more interested in the managers who illogically conclude that's a
legitimate reason not to bank on Perl, and in the managers who don't
realize that there's a lot of useful Perl going on behind their backs.
- Kurt
* I'm not saying that Perl shouldn't be a moving target, just that
it has a justified reputation as a moving-target language.
