We all know that becoming skilled in a language is an investment - time and energy. When another language rears its head in one of my projects or groups I try to leverage this notion.
Why do we want to fork our skill set? Sure language X is good at doing "foo". What do you think would happen if you invested the time you have to spend time figuring out how to do "foo" language X into figuring out how to do "foo" in Perl? The result is that you get foo done, you bolster your overall Perl expertise and thereby can support your legacy code more effectively and produce better Perl code in the future. That is why I program exclusively in Perl now - and I am a much much better Perl programmer for it! I feel this argument can be applied against any language (including Perl of course!). Get them to agree on this premise first - bad to fork skill sets. Then at that point you can identify the objections against Perl. Each objection you find a satisfactory response of course. I tend to haul out "sure language X is good at doing foo - but if you look around - Perl is the best general purpose language you can find - and it can do foo too!" argument. Pyton might stand up to that argument quite well, too - but you have the "invest in the legacy to improve the future" argument to back you up. If they still stick with language X then religion has won and there was nothing you could do or say anyway. They just really want to use language X and have the authority to make that decision. Jay On October 9, 2002 01:50 pm, Curtis Poe wrote: > I have no significant problems with Python, per se, but one of our > developers is doing desktop client development work in Python and we may be > switching a server, currently written in Perl, to Python. In general, > there seems to be a bit of a Python Good, Perl Bad movement starting here > at work. > > We have plenty of Perl code lying around so it's not like we'll stop using > Perl and I have no problem learning Python, but if things keep going in > their current direction, there are going to be discussions about whether or > not all of our future development should be in Python. The desktop > developer loathes Perl with a passion and would love to see it go away. > > Does anyone know Python well enough to offer comments about whether or not > this is a reasonable move? I *love* Perl and don't want to toss it out of > my company's toolbox.
