LPM: Roll call ...

[Wesley]

Rich Bowen wrote:
> I'd really like to know how people are using Perl in their work. I'd
> also really like to know the general attitude of management towards Perl
> - whether it is accepted as a 'real' programming language, whether
> people actually know that you are running business-critical processes on
> Perl, stuff like that.
> 
> I would like to know a more about how people first "discovered" perl,
> how they developed and enhanced their proficiency, etc.
> 
> Rich

I'm not entirely sure, but I think my boss sees Perl as something I went
and installed on about a dozen Win95 machines for dubious purposes. 
Last week I had to hand over the Artistic License, Community License,
and GPL that come with ActivePerl to convince him it wasn't bootlegged. 
(Also confessed to installing emacs on my own machine...)  Those
machines use Perl to figure out if the server's version of our MS-Access
front-end is more current than their local version, and replaces the
local version if it is.  That was my first real perl script, written
sometime last Fall.  It's probably much longer than it needs to be, but
it works.

What my boss may or may not know is that I also wrote a major EDI
application in Perl this past winter.  This thing runs a bunch of
queries against a SQL Server, writes results to a few files, runs
statistics on those results, than creates a standard X12 file to send to
JCAHO.  It takes about 20-25 minutes to run (40% of that spent
connecting/disconnecting), but otherwise runs fine.  I've looked at
using perl for some NT admin stuff, but I haven't found the time to
figure out those modules, plus I personally don't spend that much time
administering NT to start with.

I started with the Camel book last fall, and got Advanced Perl
Programming and Mastering Regular Expressions for Christmas, just in
time for the EDI project.  I got interested partly from hearing Rich go
on and on about it for years, and partly because I tried using Visual
Basic last year and grew frustrated with it.  I've also been messing
with linux for nearly a year at home, and decided that perl is a good
skill to learn that will help me both here at home and at work.

Besides learning more and better perl, I'd be glad to hear any
strategies for perl advocacy in an NT/AS400 shop where most of us
program in either VB or RPG.  Since the biggest reason we use VB is for
the GUI results, does anyone have any experience with perl/Tk?

-- 
Wes
shelda at ibm.net
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