All the Perl that's Practical to Extract and Report

perl advocacy

gav on 2002-06-28T01:40:26

I was investigating Reefknot and came across this thread which contains such gems as:

  • Can I make a request that a portable programming language (eg C) be considered instead of perl
  • If I was doing it [..] I would have used Python or Java. These languages and an OOP aproach would, IMHO, more suitable for a project of this scale and complexity
  • If you want to create a free alternative to Exchange why not program it in C? Afaik it's more robust & portable
We need people proclaiming perl's virtues to the masses. I think to get perl projects and tools that are 1st class better press and to push them as a viable alternative is the way forward.

More ideas to come, this is but a teaser. /me dons his shining hat of perl advocacy +42

Advocacy + 42

chromatic on 2002-06-28T01:58:40

I was recently involved in helping a company choose a language for desktop application development. The contenders were Java (buzzword compliance), Perl (developer knowledge), and Python (somewhat less developer knowledge). The management originally liked Java because it had mindshare, while Python was unknown and Perl was considered a toy. It was ruled out due to VM issues, Microsoft's antics to countermand Sun, performance, and deployment issues. Python was chosen because it has much better documentation for wxWindows (the chosen GUI toolkit), a better debugger (closer to Smalltalk's than the Perl debugger), and shipped with tools to compile to a Windows executable very easily.

If it weren't for the lack of wxPerl documentation and the presence and ease of py2exe, I think Perl would have had the edge.

I'd like to see Ovid do a nice writeup of his experiences with L'ane. It sounds like that may fit -- rapid development, free software, maintainability and testing.