[Bloomington-normal-pm] Perl for business

[Daniel S. Lewart]

Erik, et al,

> The reason I ask is that I've been having trouble using it lately (I've
> been coding perl for a few years now). It's a very useful language, and
> with CPAN, you can accomplish a lot in perl with little effort. However,
> when I try to demonstrate things for non-perl coders, they say it
> should have been written in something else.  For example, our ACS club
> at Illinois State University just had a coding competition for C++ and
> Java. I wanted to enter the C++ competition and wrap perl into my C code
> via perl.h, but I was told that it wasn't allowed. (It was a fair call
> under their guidelines, but I still wanted to use perl) Another one of my
> instructors wanted our class to write a network application, so I called
> IO::Socket and wrote both the client and server really quick. I was told
> that I couldn't use it because it didn't demonstrate what he wanted.

Good for you!

> The slogan for the Chicago PM is "You've got to love a language that's
> banned because it makes problems too easy to solve." This is true, but
> what are the advantages to knowing this when I can't use it anywhere
> except for my own projects?

See the famous "Perl `Too Good'" story:
	http://archive.develooper.com/perl-trainers@perl.org/msg00142.html

I use Perl everyday, as do lots of people.  If a workplace bans Perl,
don't waste your time working there.

Good luck!
Daniel Lewart
http://cmi.pm.org/