Phoenix.pm: Perl Advocacy

[Doug Miles]

Cakperldev at aol.com wrote:
> 
> Hi there everyone. Hope Tuesday's meeting went well.
> 
> I have a question about advocacy that I'd like your thoughts on.
> 
> First, some background.
> 
> I work for the Phoenix Municipal Court in the IST department writing and
> maintaining software for our Court Management System. This system is written
> in a language called JAM. The system is currently character based and the
> court would like to move to GUI. There are a number of possible commercial
> solutions all of which have some drawbacks so I took the liberty of
> developing and demonstrating a possible perl/Tk solution for my boss as
> another option.
> 
> He is interested in it but has some reservations about converting our entire
> system to perl. I have already used perl to solve some really sticky problems
> in our system so he knows that perl can do the job. His concerns are about
> the longevity and viability of perl as a language. Will it be around in two
> years? Who maintains it? If we update our database, where do we get new
> drivers? Who supports it? That kind of thing.
> 
> So my question to you is, if you were in my place, what resources would you
> point your boss to in order to improve his/her comfort level with perl as a
> real world solution?
> 
> Thanks
> CAK

Here is a list of real world success stories with perl:

http://perl.oreilly.com/news/success_stories.html

Here is a perl advocacy site:

http://www.perl.org/

topics include:

Enterprise level support
On-site training
Perl is Y2K compliant
Perl reduces business risks

To answer some of the questions myself

> His concerns are about the longevity and viability of perl as a language.
> Will it be around in two years?

Perl has already been around for over ten years.  Compare this to Java.
;)  Actually, it can be argued that Open Source programs have more
longevity than commercial programs.  A company can choose to drop
support of a product at any time.  They can also go out of business. 
With Open Source, as long as people are interested in the program, it
will be improved and supported.  Given people working on the project can
come and go, but there is still a base of support.

>Who maintains it?

The perl community.  As long as there are people using perl (which will
be a long time) it will be maintained.  Perl 6 is being developed now,
but there is already a plan in place to continue support of Perl 5.

> If we update our database, where do we get new drivers?

CPAN.  If it is a currently supported database (of which there are quite
a few) you can bet that you won't be the only one interested in
supporting new features of new database versions.

> Who supports it?

Again, you can get free support from the community:
This list
http://www.perlmonks.org/
Usenet

There is also commercial support available.  Check http://www.perl.org/.

-- 
- Doug

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