hi all,

this should perk up this list a bit. i have a real life major advocacy
situation and i need all the help i can get. i just landed a consulting
position as a perl guru at a major financial firm in boston. it is a
corporate java place but there is a fair amount of perl around. in
particular there is a major web application that handles millions of
hits a day. it is an very unusual design with a heavily customized perl
5.6 (!)  being the main engine inside the iplanet (sun's old netscape)
webserver.

but i am not here to discuss that design. my main boss is a senior vp
and his boss is an executive vp who is asking "why perl?". this web
system has had some instabilities over the last year (one of my tasks is
to help fix that) and so the exec vp is getting leery of perl. and they
have the usual fud about perl such as write once, can't find perl
hackers, etc. i will be preparing a fud/myth busting writeup soon so any
ideas on that are welcome. in particular any references to studies or
other things that show how much more effective perl is than java would
be great. i already can tell them that perl runs faster, perl hackers
develop faster and you need fewer of them than java coders. but
supporting evidence would great.

i know about perl.com's success stories (and i will scan them for some
good cases) but i want to hear some more and particularly about
financial and/or web stuff. i will throw amazon, ticketmaster, morgan
stanley, yahoo finance at them to start as they are all large financial
perl sites. any others that would impress them?  if anyone here works in
those shops or in other large perl-centric places can you write me and
tell me about it?

they have a 'open source community' internal web site already and it has
java stuff and a link to a perl section but it returns a 500 error. :)
so i will be working on that side as well. one goal i have is to get
this perl community site off the ground and create a 'perl center of
excellency' like the java one they have. there is a fair amount perl
going on there in various pockets and i will be asking around and
surveying its use. creating a perl community there will make it easier
to do more perl and get the backing of the top brass.

thanx,

uri

-- 
Uri Guttman  ------  [EMAIL PROTECTED]  -------- http://www.stemsystems.com
--Perl Consulting, Stem Development, Systems Architecture, Design and Coding-
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