Following the thread below made me wonder a bit if I'm living in a world different from many of the posters on this list. I've worked at a dozen places or so over past 15 years ( I contract a lot) and at almost every one the choice of language for the main work to be done (as well as all the other principal tools of the trade) was made by others before I arrived. In order to work in Perl I look first for jobs that are to be done in Perl. I have almost never had the luxury of choosing the *principal language* or other tools to be used to complete the main task at hand. In my experience changes in primary languages and toolsets come about either (1) Because a group of developers sees a better choice and makes a concerted effort (read sell job) *as a group* to bring about the change. (2) Management somewhere up the chain dictates a change. Individual developers able to choose on their own what language they'd like to use for the next major project almost never happens where I live. What do others see?
Tools and tasks off the main line, that don't go into the released code, are a different matter. Regards, Jim Eshelman ----- Original Message ----- From: "John Redford" <[email protected]> To: "'Tom Metro'" <[email protected]>; "'Bill Ricker'" <[email protected]> Cc: "'Boston PM'" <[email protected]> Sent: 03/15/2010 11:29 AM Subject: Re: [Boston.pm] what Perl can do at non-Perl Conferences Tom Metro wrote: > > Bill Ricker wrote: > > Do we want to do something at the LinuxCon in South Boston in August? > > Doing it better, though, isn't trivial. It would take some research and > work to first understand the reasons why developers have left Perl, the > impression they have of Perl, and their concerns over using it on a > work > project. (Of course we can all speculate and guess at the answers to > these, but there's danger in doing so from within the community, as > those that have stuck with Perl have obviously not considered the > deficiencies significant enough to justify abandoning the language.) John Redford: As a nigh-former Perl user who has essentially "left Perl" -- now perhaps using it about once a year -- I can tell you the main reason without resorting to speculation: Other languages got better. ... _______________________________________________ Boston-pm mailing list [email protected] http://mail.pm.org/mailman/listinfo/boston-pm
