Re: Rebutting my Perl enthusiasm

[zigster]

Firstly I would voice a note of caution some IT is full of zealots (there are many monks in that camp ;-) ) if this guy is a zealot then no amount of rational arguing will make a blind bit of difference. Tiss a painful fact of life, this guy does sound quite prejudiced but hay ho.

As a csh, Perl, C, C++ etc, etc, etc. programmer using any interpreted language, how do we control the versions from customer to customer or systems to system? I would like to see a discussion on that.

I would ask him to explain what issues he means he has asked a very important question but not given you enuff information to allow you to reply. Tiss my guess that he is worried that your customers will not have perl installed. Only you can deal with this question by refering to your customer base. Perl does not come as standard as many UNIX as we would like solaris did not (not sure about 8) some versions of hpux shipped with perl 4 !! some not at all. It is a fair worry, it is reasonable to expect to have to require perl to be installed for a significant number of deployments. All depends where you are deploying.

Also, has anyone really written a major program with Perl for Genesis or Enterprise?

*grins* this is a silly comment first he acknowledges that perl is a powerful language then says he feels it may not scale. If he is woried about scaliability then point to the rest of the industry they seem to be dealing OK. If instead he is worried about your internal experience then again I would say he has a fair point. There is a learning curve to be climbed with every tech change all you can do is manage it by ensuring that it is deployed for smaller projects first.

How is everybody handling the speed issue?

What speed issue?

We have written programs in csh for years and have basically pushed that language to the limit + 1 and csh does not fail no matter how intense(There is no other language running just UNIX).

Trying to suggest that csh is a faster language is just plain dumb I would suggest that you benchmark some process. Take a csh script and re-write it in perl to show him where the speed problem is ;-)
I am not sure what the parenthesised sentence means.

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).

Once again ask him what he means by weak .. does he not like them or does he consider them slow or simply not there. It is hard to deal with such vague criticism.

A few more items of discussion: 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 of the woods are you in, it is true that good perl rogrammers are hard to find but then I would have to imagine that so are CSH programmers. Cross training is a viable alternatve if you have csh/C/C++ people. I would directly challenge this comment tho I dont believe it for a minute.

I hope this helps. To sum up he comments are all to vague to reply to get him to tie them down and I am sure you will find out how little he actually knows. Good luck in your quest </p?
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Zigster