Re: Parrot, the future of dynamic languages ?

[dimar]

You mention this is about a half hour presentation. Based on the range of ideas you present, that probably means you intend to narrow it down to one or two bullet points to stay within the time allotment.

Not knowing the background of the audience, here is a perspective from a 'bean-counter' type manager who cares most about Business Advantages: 1) what advantages in terms of total cost of ownership; 2) what benefits and momentum would encourage a switch to Parrot instead of (say for example) dotNet (or are the two mutually compatible); 3) what advantages do you see in terms of product lifecycle, production process and acquiring and maintaining personnel who are competent with this technology.

As with any presentation, the know your audience rule surely must apply here ... so the preceeding is just one perspective assuming you are talking to a not-necessarily-perl-centric crowd that may not be intimately familiar with the technical details, but still interested if you can present a compelling strategic, business value proposition.

[szabgab]

The audience is expected to be IT managers, people whom are mostly see Perl stereo-typed. They probably have never heard of most of the other languages, maybe only PHP and about Perl they have misconceptions (shell replacement language))

Actually Zeev Suraski of Zend will talk about an hour after me, so they will hear about PHP a lot.

I think your questions were really in place, so what are the answeres ?

[xorl]

I'll probably get downvoted for this, but even after many years of using Perl, I still think of it as a shell replacement language. Heck in the interview for the job I have now, I even said I don't bother with bash scripting, I just use perl.

[Jenda]

The issue is not whether Perl is ALSO a shell replacement language. The issue is that some people think it's JUST a shell replacement language.

[hakkr]

And I DO see the end of Java and C#, and NET except for the corporate fools who will hang on to it, because they "invested their life's training" into it.

First of all many corporate fools use and also hang onto Perl. Perl is not just the domain of the hobbyist.

And second of all you rightly point out there is a magnitude more trained up MS and Sun developers than Perl developers. But is seldom takes 'a life training' to learn a language. Its all just syntax, Give me someone trained in programming theory and best practice over someone who is blindly wed to a syntax anyday. it's not really a like for like comparison to compare Perl with Langauges that have been extended with Enterprise frameworks