On Thu, Aug 16, 2001 at 09:05:52AM -0400, Tad McClellan wrote:
> You have to speak to businesspeople in language they can relate to.
>
> They don't care that Perl is beautiful/elegant/terse. They don't
> have to look at it. Easy implementation is not "their problem".
> They count beans, show them the beans:
>
> "We had 1 Perl programmer do that because we did not have
> 3 Java programmers available to do it."
Bingo.
We've all heard this. We've all been there. There is a lot of annecdotal
evidence to support this assertion, but nothing we can point to.
If anyone wants to talk about this further, I'd be happy to write up
such success stories and post them on somewhere.perl.org. You can
contact me at [EMAIL PROTECTED]
> Most businesspeople would understand that accomplishing the same
> tasks with a smaller payroll is a Good Thing.
Another trend I've noticed is that many Perl people pick up new
skills quite easily. I was talking to a hybrid Perl/PHP shop
earlier this week, and they are pretty confident that a good Perl
programmer can pick up PHP quickly (~1 day; they have experience
to back this up). Similar things could be said for Cold Fusion, ASP,
VB, JavaScript, etc.
The trend seems to be that "professionals" have more experience
with a wider range of tools and adapt more easily to new tools.
This is in stark contrast to someone whose qualification for being
a "web programmer" is a 5 hour course in HTML or JavaScript. (Paul
Graham and the MIT crowd say similar things about LISP and Scheme
programmers, disparaging managers hiring C++ and Java coders instead.)
What this tells me is that it's easier to find professionals (for
lack of a better term) using Perl because it's a tool for
professionals[*]. Furthermore, those professionals have an easier
time adjusting to other tools when the time comes.
Z.
*: A tool for professionals, but not to the exclusion of beginners
and amateurs.
