> Considering that maybe your boss, being a Senior VP, isn't very sensible to the 
> language's specs, I'd try a more high level approach:
... and the VP will respond something like this:

>
> - Perl is an Open Source language with world wide support of a large enthusiastic 
> community independent from 3rd party corporate interests
It does not have a "father". What if those people lose interest. What if
we have a problem and those kids are not interested in fixing it.
We cannot afford to invest in something so risky.

> - A lot has been done through the years to enrich the language (CPAN)
I can buy the same things for Java.
Where can I buy support for those libraries on CPAN ?
What about copyright issues ? I'll need to ask our lawyer ($200/hour) for
every library we download.

> - It's no spring chicken.  Perl has been around for many years, and it's used 
> because it's good, not because someone sold it as vaporware very well
Perl is an old langugage, does it have objects anyway ?

> - Being also free, in case your boss changes his mind later, there is no risk of 
> regretting some big licenses investment
So you say it might not fit ? I want to decide on our language of choice
NOW ! And yes, BTW what you pay is what you get.

> - Perl is quite lightweight and tipycally does not need big hardware or expensive 
> application servers to run, like Java does
Hardware is cheap, it is not relevant. Does Perl have such a wide choice
of Application Servers ?

> - If finding Java programmers is easier, then finding bad Java programmers also is. 
> Quality and quantity differ.
Perl scripters can't even read each others code.

> - A bad OO Java architecture has tipycally tragic performance problems and is hard 
> to reengineer. A poorly implemented Perl architecture is more easily tuned and fixed
Perl is an interpreted scripting languge. It is known to be slow.

> - EAR deployment consumes too much development time
Installing 50 modules from CPAN is a nightmare.

> - Perl also runs everywhere
Does it run on mobile phones and on PDAs ?

>
> Of course there are pros and cons. I can tell you that by my experience that Java 
> sells better as a concept (it helped to sell lots of computer mags in the past) But 
> at the end of the day, Perl applications are usually much more flexible for changing 
> and tunning. The simple thought of EJB and EJB-QL makes me be sure of this.

So what are the pros ?


Gabor
ps. Basically these were the answeres I got from someone who is not even a
VP.

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