I have a little problem. I have been touting the benefits of using Perl to my peers in my industry's mailing list. My former boss - who has a tremendous ego and is not a good programmer, but does have a reputation in the industry - is argueing against every point I try to make. I fear that if I reply to the most recent post he made, it will only hurt my cause because it will probably be a direct attack on his abilities.

So I propose you read his letter and give me a little ammo against his statements.

Start former bosses post:

Hello all, I guess that it is time to put my two cents in. I'm glad to see that everyone is expanding languages for the Genesis and Enterprise. As we all know, Perl is a very powerful language and is much more powerful then most. There are some issues that are very evident that I would like to throw in. 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. Also, has anyone really written a major program with Perl for Genesis or Enterprise? How is everybody handling the 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). 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).

We have almost completely moved all interaction to Genesis and Enterprise to HTML and C. This works for us, but we have had to write all our own libraries, and I would not expect most users to do this. We are always looking for a better way to write simple Genesis or Enterprise plug ins, but 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.

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. This is something to think about as a management team start to spend a ton money on a development team that might not always be there. You will have all these programs that no one knows how to fix or modify. That last issue is the TK interface, has anybody made a decent library to help that language, I have programmed in C++ and used many object oriented languages, but TK has many flaws that could be supplemented with a good call library. I would be interested to help there if anyone wants to make Perl really work better for Genesis or Enterprise.

End former bosses post

Well... that's what he wrote. Does anyone have some remarks that I can send back?

Thanks for your time

Prost,
Moe