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in reply to Have you heard about recent startups using Perl?

What do you count as "using Perl"? My startup is using Perl to flesh out the prototype, though we will be writing our product in C. We almost certainly will be using Perl for a good chunk of the testing tools, though we will probably use other languages, as well. I don't see the point of touting "WE IS A PERL PLACE!" If the shoe fits, use it. If the shoe does not fit, find a better shoe. Perl tends to fit a lot of places, which is why it's used in a lot of places. In fact, I would be willing to bet that every single Fortune 1000 company uses Perl and has more lines of Perl in active use than all but their most used language. If that's not penetration, I don't know what is.

My criteria for good software:
  1. Does it work?
  2. Can someone else come in, make a change, and be reasonably certain no bugs were introduced?

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Re^2: Have you heard about recent startups using Perl?
by zby (Vicar) on Mar 27, 2008 at 14:57 UTC
    Thanks for the informative reply, but I don't by the shoe analogy - you don't need to learn for entire years how to wear a shoes - but that is the case with programming languages (if you take into account learning about the available libraries, the community mailing lists and websites).
      Really? I have yet to find a language that a competent developer cannot become conversant enough to be useful within a couple weeks. Within 3-4 months, with guidance, that developer can become solidly embedded into the community. Personally, I've done this with Javascript (was a Dojo contributor within 3 months of really taking up the language) and flirted doing so with Ruby. Programming is programming. Coding is coding. Don't confuse the two.

      My criteria for good software:
      1. Does it work?
      2. Can someone else come in, make a change, and be reasonably certain no bugs were introduced?
        You know 3-4 months is still much longer than what you need to learn how to wear a shoe. And this is after you deflated your goal to just 'conversant' - I would rather for 'fluent' and stay with 'years'.