On Mon, Jun 30, 2008 at 10:34 PM, Lyle <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > Hi All, > These days I hear a lot of:- > "You should use language X for this, language Y for that and language Z > for the other" > "Because language X was designed for this, Y is most commonly used for > that, and Z was made for that OS" >
Hi Lyle While I'm (of course) very much in favour of Perl, I think for the most part it's possible to hire bright programmers who can adapt to whatever language or platform they need to. I've found the bigger challenge to be in helping non-technical senior management to make sensible choices and in helping them to trust their expensive technical staff. I've worked places where the language/platform selection has been based on some made-up nonsense about customers being more comfortable with X or Y and if we use Z then we won't be able to sell (Z being anything that isn't Java or .net). I've also seen what should have been considered strategic decisions become panic-stricken knee-jerk changes which waste huge amounts of money. There's also a problem in between the two - convincing the non-technical manager that it's less risky to convert your existing team from Z to X than it is to try and hire new staff with 5 years experience in X. This can be a distinct problem with Perl to be honest: if you find yourself having to look for an experienced Perl programmer, well, good luck. All good fun! Everywhere I've worked has had legacy code in a language that the company doesn't write in any more (often C, but you'd be amazed by some of the stuff I saw at the county council I worked for:-). So that's just a fact of life for the most part. Something I would say about Perl is that as a programmer it exposes you to a lot of concepts that make other languages easier to pick up (when you inevitably have to pick them up). Perl's closures made a "meta-programming in javascript" talk I saw make perfect sense and some of Ruby's features were familiar too. Perl's references mean I'm not terrified of pointers. Perl's OO (if you can call it that) made Java an easy (if tedious) switch (and Java made C# straigtforward to learn). Perl's regexes meant I could help my Dad with his PHP questions. Alex _______________________________________________ BristolBathPM mailing list [email protected] http://mailman.bristolbath.org/mailman/listinfo/bristolbathpm
