Perl Vs. Everything else

[bill_day at mcgraw-hill.com]

As a perspective I'd like to share a true story of the executives who brought us
the grand unifying language theory. There are a few on this mailing list who
will remember, but to protect the innocent, I will tell you they are no longer
in the McGraw-Hill domain.

I think it was 1996 or 97. A man we had never met before came from our N.J.
offices and informed us that they had signed a multi-million dollar contract
with a high tech startup in silicon alley. In the future all programming work
would be done in VB. One outsourced project was done in VB, and one in house
project was done in VB. The silicon alley startup was fired. The applications
remain largely untouched because the people who did the work have moved along,
and nobody else cares to touch them.

The VERY NEXT TRIP of an executive from N.J. we were told that all work would be
done in Java/CORBA. I don't know if you remember the state of Java in 96, but it
was still very primitive, and it was very difficult to accomplish much of
anything useful. NO projects were EVER completed in Java/CORBA.

We remain primarily C++ shop with some Perl, because that is the culture of the
programmers who do the work.

The lesson to be learned here: We lost a lot of talented people, and wasted a
lot of time because executives were making decisions that are outside their area
of expertise. When bad decisions were made the smart people left. Have your
resume ready.