[HoustonTx.pm] Perl programming in Houston

[houston-admin at mail.pm.org]

On Wednesday 11 December 2002 08:23 pm, houston-admin at mail.pm.org wrote:
>   1. "Perl is free, so it doesn't have any support."
>   2. "We'll never find any Perl programmers to maintain it. But, we
>       can always find qw/Java C++ .Net VisualBasic/ programmers."
>
> I've been able to point to various support systems around the Net to
> answer #1. But, #2 has been harder. I'm hoping this list will help in
> that direction.

You might point out how much web programming is done in Perl, and how many web 
developers are looking for work these days. Sad to say, there's a lot of 
truth to that.

You might also point to the activity levels on CPAN, or traffic on 
Perl-related Usenet groups, as indicators of the amount of Perl programming 
going on. Compare the latter to the traffic levels on qw{Java C++ .Net VB} 
newsgroups.

> II. What other languages do you program in besides Perl and why?
>
>  1. C++   - sometimes I need to work at a lower level than Perl.
>  2. Forth - my former employer used it extensively.
>  3. Java  - requested for an project.

Python - I needed to do a joint project with another developer, and it was the 
only scripting language we could agree on. (I don't dislike Python, BTW; but 
using regexes in Python is needlessly inconvenient, since they are not part 
of the language syntax as with Perl. And I miss not having "use strict".)

Java and JavaScript - we need to do do some client-side processing (though I'm 
only peripherally involved in this part of our system).

-- 
Kevin Shaum       --   http://kevin.shaum.com/
kevin at shaum.com   --   http://lazypundit.com/