[HoustonTx.pm] Perl programming in Houston

[houston-admin at mail.pm.org]

> I. What has been your general experience with getting projects
>    started using Perl?
>

Really, I haven't had a great deal of problems attempting to get new
projects started using Perl, but I'm rather aggressive and often (overly)
confident.  The only time I ever really had any issues regarding languages,
was working at Questia, where the product development department was heavily
entrenched in Java, and (myself working in Technical Services) assumed that
we couldn't do anything nearly as effectively as they could.  It didn't take
me long to prove them wrong.

On some cases, however, I've been forced to make some changes to the way I
look at programming, and what type of programming I do.  This summer, after
having been out-of-work for some time, I almost broke down and went to work
for a MS-Partner, however, I was able to convince them that although they do
nothing but COM and .NET, I was able to do both of those in Perl.  But, this
became a moot point as we were able to get our own company off the ground.

One of the big points I like to make is that we can prototype it in Perl,
and refactor it in C, Java, or whatnot if they find the performance lacking.
Not once has any project been refactored through.  It seems that the
well-known efficiency of prototyping in Perl comes to win here.  In most
cases, as long as the prototype fulfills all of their performance and
functionality requirements, they are unlikely to spend extra money
re-writing it.

As far as finding perl programmers, I'm not sure what the difficulty is
here. Well, finding *experienced* perl programmers is rather difficult, but
finding them in general has never been a problem for me.  It seems that
almost every admin in the now-mostly-defunct ISP industry had to learn perl,
and while they often aren't the most proficient, they tend to pick it up
pretty rapidly (at least, the ones I work with now).  However, it does seem
that a lot of perl programmers I've met lately don't feel a need to learn
the basic concepts of programming that are not specific to perl, much less
OOP or any sort of architecture.  This is a problem that I think we managers
and architects have to address, through training.

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

I've been known to use:

Tcl/Tk (ok, so I worked for one of the authors of Ext. Tcl many moons ago,
otherwise, I probably wouldn't touch it)
Sh/Bash/Tcsh scripting (comes in handy every day, although I never use grep,
sed, or awk anymore =)
C/C++ (mostly for inlining into perl, or writing XS -- I'm not very
proficient at C/C++)
ColdFusion (I had to lead a group of CF developers once, I figured that I
should know the 'language' they use...)
Apple Basic was my first language

!c

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