Perl Vs. Everything else

[Steve D Poling]

This raises an interesting issue in the light of the caveats about "throwing
software away" (http://www.joelonsoftware.com/stories/storyReader$47). How
does one switch from Language A to Language B without "throwing it all
away"?

The boys at Q2 (the silicon alley contractor) did just that when they came
in and took a C/C++ project into VB. That project was doomed for a number of
reasons: company selection based upon cronyism (Kevin/Uday), distrust of the
MGH bungie bosses (Jack/Rich/Frank), the threat that Q2 would be used to
"beat up Grand Rapids." That failure had as many non-technical reasons as
technical ones. I worked with the Q2 guys and found them competent, albeit
married to VB.

Q2's switch to VB (and idiotic politics) forced a complete rewrite. The
application was a fairly simple container app that leveraged many
VBX/OCX/ActiveX components. I thought that was a Good Thing. The bad thing
is that nobody was smart enough (myself included) to insist that this simple
container app be written in C/C++ and build upon the extant codebase.

I try to be pragmatic and ecclectic. Different languages solve different
problems more or less graciously. UI-centric applications are more quickly
prototyped in VB. C/C++ applications are more modular.

M$ propaganda says .NET is being all things to all people. One may be able
to craft applications where different modules are implemented in different
languages. Perl for text/string/data munging, VB for snappy UIs, C/C++ for
heavy algorithms, and C# to make Bill Gates richer. This may seem evil to
people who think one language should do it all. Time will tell.

Think back on "throwing it all away" when changing languages is a strategic
goal. In the .NET world, you can evolve between languages one module at a
time.

smiles and cheers,

steve


p.s.
The "silicon alley" company, Q2, was founded by James Glick, the author of
_Chaos_. A fact I always found hugely amusing/ironic.

> -----Original Message-----
> From: owner-grand-rapids-pm-list at pm.org
> [mailto:owner-grand-rapids-pm-list at pm.org]On Behalf Of
> bill_day at mcgraw-hill.com
> Sent: Monday, September 24, 2001 9:43 AM
> To: grand-rapids-pm-list at happyfunball.pm.org
> Subject: Re: Perl Vs. Everything else
>
>
>
> As a perspective I'd like to share a true story of the executives
> who brought us
> the grand unifying language theory. There are a few on this
> mailing list who
> will remember, but to protect the innocent, I will tell you they
> are no longer
> in the McGraw-Hill domain.
>
> I think it was 1996 or 97. A man we had never met before came
> from our N.J.
> offices and informed us that they had signed a multi-million
> dollar contract
> with a high tech startup in silicon alley. In the future all
> programming work
> would be done in VB. One outsourced project was done in VB, and
> one in house
> project was done in VB. The silicon alley startup was fired. The
> applications
> remain largely untouched because the people who did the work have
> moved along,
> and nobody else cares to touch them.
>
> The VERY NEXT TRIP of an executive from N.J. we were told that
> all work would be
> done in Java/CORBA. I don't know if you remember the state of
> Java in 96, but it
> was still very primitive, and it was very difficult to accomplish much of
> anything useful. NO projects were EVER completed in Java/CORBA.
>
> We remain primarily C++ shop with some Perl, because that is the
> culture of the
> programmers who do the work.
>
> The lesson to be learned here: We lost a lot of talented people,
> and wasted a
> lot of time because executives were making decisions that are
> outside their area
> of expertise. When bad decisions were made the smart people left.
> Have your
> resume ready.
>
>
>