[HoustonTx.pm] Perl programming in Houston

[houston-admin at mail.pm.org]

houston-admin at mail.pm.org wrote:
>I haven't noticed much traffic on this list lately, so I thought I'd
>attempt some discussion.
>
>I. What has been your general experience with getting projects
>   started using Perl?

In house - no problem.  I work with (and act as one myself) unix sys
admins.  Perl is pretty much expected.

>I've encountered more than a bit of reservation on two counts:
>(neither is technical)
>
>  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.

<rant>
  Sounds like `they' are stressing quantity over quality.  Quantity
  leads to lower salaries, of course (all other things being equal,
  which they aren't).  It's almost like the romance novel industry
  vs.  the literary novel industry.  Romance novelists are a dime a
  dozen because they are expected to write to an outline provided by
  the publisher -- they want interchangable authors.  Readers buy
  romance novels by brand instead of by author.  Literary novelists
  are individuals and are read because of who the author is, not
  because of the imprint.
</rant> 

>II. What other languages do you program in besides Perl and why?

Shell (sh) - gets simple jobs done
TeX/LaTeX - papers / documents
XSLT - XML transformations / web applications
Tcl - because that's what the vendor supported
PHP - because that's what the vendor supported

Past languages:
  C/C++ - school projects and code before I learned Perl
  Forth - for fun
  Lisp - interesting ideas, but very limited experience
  TMS9900 assembly (and machine code) - for fun (in the TI 99/4A)
  Pascal (UCSD p-System) - on the ol' TI where I first encountered
      threading and semaphores
  Basic - my first computer language
-- 
James Smith <JGSmith at TAMU.Edu>, 979-862-3725
Texas A&M CIS Operating Systems Group, Unix