[HoustonTx.pm] Perl programming in Houston

[houston-admin at mail.pm.org]

On Wed, 11 Dec 2002 22:05:28 -0600
houston-admin at mail.pm.org wrote:

> >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> 

Believe me, I've made these arguments before (about Perl and another
language). But, part of their argument _is_ accurate. If they cannot
find any people with the skill in question, how can they justify
depending on it.

I _think_ that there is probably a reasonable-sized Perl community
here in Houston. I'd just like to be able to point to it. Hopefully
this group will help on this point.

> >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

Well...if we're going to include past languages.<grin/>

General Purpose
 C, C++, Forth, Perl, Java, Basic Plus, FORTRAN, Lisp,
 Pascal (a little), SmallTalk (a little)

Currently Learning
 Python, Java

Text Manipulation
 LaTex/TeX, DocBook, m4, AWK, troff/nroff

Special Purpose
 lex/flex, yacc/bison/occs, bash, command.com batch, 4nt batch, make

Web
 HTML, JavaScript, CSS, XML, XSLT

> -- 
> James Smith <JGSmith at TAMU.Edu>, 979-862-3725
> Texas A&M CIS Operating Systems Group, Unix
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> 

Later,
G. Wade
-- 
"Zathras have very sad life. Probably also have sad death. But at least
there is symmetry."                                         -- Zathras