Re: Rebutting my Perl enthusiasm

[KM]

how do we control the versions from customer to customer or systems to system

Hard to comment on, since I don't know how your company works. But, if you avoid any Perl 5.6-isms, you should likely be OK. What does he mean by 'system to system'? UNIX to NT? RedHat Linux to IRIX? Paying attention to the perlport man page should help with any issues on that.

How is everybody handling the speed issue?

What speed issue? He touts csh, but worries about speed issues in Perl? How about speed of development? Or speed of finding reusable code? Has this man heard of optimizations?

have written programs in csh for years and have basically pushed that language to the limit + 1 and csh does not fail

As davorg pointed to, he should be refered to this. I once had a boss who wanted us to do things in Fortran, because he knew it well, and it always worked well for him. How portable is csh? How portable is Perl? We also have moved into the SQL arena and the Perl API is a little weak and slow when talking to the SQL engines that I'm using(Oracle, MYSQL Ver 3.2xx, SQLServer 7.0).

NOONE else uses Perl to talk to these engines!! Weak? I have never had a problem. Slow? Maybe queries are bad, maybe indexes are wrong, maybe this is the fault of the dba (always blame it on the dba!) Or, your own DBD can be written to make it faster.

I would like to hear if anyone has done some complicated things with Perl. A panelization script or basic process control is not a test of Perl handling.

As Randal suggested, refer to the Success Stories. Refer him to POE, or any countless complex module. Or, is he talking about the abilities of this companies employees?

Where do we find Perl programmers, csh programmers are everywhere, but Perl programmers seems to be a dyeing breed at lease in our neck of the woods

What neck? There are Perl programmers everywhere! Many of them looking to find a Perl-centric job. I would guess many Perl programmers will also have csh on their resume. Suggest relocating good candidates. Suggest searching job boards. Tell him only csh programmer spell 'dying' with an 'e'.

I would be interested to help there if anyone wants to make Perl really work better for Genesis or Enterprise.

He can send patches to p5p :)

It almost sounds like this guy likes what he knows well, and doesn't know much about Perl. Personally, I would throw some of the back at him. He doesn't say how or why he thinks the DBI interface is slow and weak, or what he is comparing the slowness and weakness to. He should read this, which tells of how NBCi uses Perl with it's databases, or here so he can learn how UniCredito Italiano uses Perl/DBI, as well as here to learn how the US Census Bureau uses Perl.

I hope some of this helps, and wasn't just a big rant :)

Cheers,
KM