[HoustonTx.pm] Perl programming in Houston

houston-admin at mail.pm.org houston-admin at mail.pm.org
Wed Dec 11 23:31:06 CST 2002


On Wed, 11 Dec 2002 22:52:03 -0600
houston-admin at mail.pm.org wrote:

> 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.

Good point, except... many of those are ASP or ColdFusion developers
or <shudder/> FrontPage people. I haven't found that to be as
convincing as it should be.

> 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.

I've pointed that out. But, the issue normally moves back to how many
of them are here in Houston.

> > 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/

Thanks for the thoughts.

Anybody else?

G. Wade
-- 
I have this feeling, that my luck is none too good.
                                    -- "Black Blade", Blue Oyster Cult



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