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in reply to What is Enterprise Software?

The dirty water you are trying to clear up is actually much cleaner than you thought or presented, at least in lots of other people's minds.

First of all, Perl is not enterprise software. Period. You have clearly said that you were interested in Perl advocacy. To make it fair and even, none of other programming languages is enterprise software. As a matter of fact, I never heard anyone said the opposite before. All what I have heard were things like, foo language can easily support enterprise software.

"Perl is decentralized though, so if it blows up in one place, it might be fine in another."

The above was just one example where you tried to fit Perl with the definition of enterprise software. Perl certainly has nothing to do with either centralize or decentralize. An application does, and that application could either be written in Perl, or Java, or some other languages.

To the minds of most people, Oracle is enterprise software. Oracle itself, or any other database system, is an application, and Oracle is at the high end among its peers.

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Re^2: What is Enterprise Software?
by brian_d_foy (Abbot) on Oct 31, 2005 at 00:07 UTC

    I probably should have been more clear there. The perl interpreter, java virtual machines, smalltalk environment and other such things might be considered enterprise software because you need them to make things work. They aren't similar to the output of a C or C++ program. You can run a program written in C without having a C compiler, but to run a Perl program you need a perl interpreter.

    The perl intrepreter is decentralized though. Most places don't have only one perl intrepreter that everyone has to use for everything everywhere.

    You haven't cleared the water much though. As I said at the start, many people can come up with a definition pretty quickly, but that doesn't mean that they are right or that their definition matches anyone else's. You haven't offered your own definition though, so you really haven't added anything.

    --
    brian d foy <brian@stonehenge.com>
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[reply]
      "You haven't cleared the water much though... You haven't offered your own definition though, so you really haven't added anything."

      I don't think there is a need for me to provide my own definition of enterprise software to be able to contribute to this discussion. If enterprise software is a concept that everybody can come up their own definitions, then it clearly tells me that the concept is not well defined.

      "The perl interpreter... might be considered enterprise software because you need them to make things work."

      You are free to think this way, but that certainly does not prove that Perl interpreter or JVM is an enterprise software according to common sense, although they could be called enterprise software according to your own definition.

[reply]

        Perhaps you can provide the common sense defintion, then, because when I went ooking for it, I didn't find it (again, as I already covered). The problem with common sense is that it isn't all as common as you think it is. Perhaps you'd rather not define it because you have other reasons you aren't telling us about?

        --
        brian d foy <brian@stonehenge.com>
        Subscribe to The Perl Review
[reply]
      The perl intrepreter is decentralized though. Most places don't have only one perl intrepreter that everyone has to use for everything everywhere.

      That's for sure. Not only will there be multiple versions in use in a company with a lot of machines, there can quite often be multiple versions in use PER server.

[reply]
      But Perl itself is too far separated from anything specific to a business. It's a general tool. Like the C++ compiler, IMHO.

      An "enterprise application" would supposedly support the business in a very specific way, otherwise the company would use another "enterprise application" better suited to it's needs.

      /J

[reply]
Re^2: What is Enterprise Software?
by cbrandtbuffalo (Deacon) on Oct 31, 2005 at 14:03 UTC
    I don't think it's that cut and dry. If a company paid a license for a development environment of some sort and had a development group that built customized behavior for the company in that environment, that company would consider that package an enterprise package. Perl, emacs, and the tools another group might build for themselves are no different, they are just free.

    However, this example doesn't agree with brian's definition that if it breaks people will notice. If the tools the developers build with the package break, everyone will notice. If the tools break and the developers can't do their work, people will *eventually* notice.

[reply]

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