[BTW, I'm wondering if this thread should be moved to advocacy] Nicholas Clark <n...@ccl4.org> writes:
> On Sun, Nov 28, 2010 at 08:03:54PM -0800, Jarrod Overson wrote: > >> Once a full rewrite is on the table it's hard for a team and/or company to >> not at least question whether or not perl is the "right" language to use >> going forward. For almost every project i've worked on in the past several >> years, it hasn't. Good perl programmers are hard to find and keep and the >> bad ones write the code that eventually has to get rewritten. > > And that isn't true for any other language? Yes. > A company not a million miles from me (but more than 1000) has just > written a disaster, in Java. And I'm curious in a couple of years how > the majority of recently written Rails apps turn out. (Particularly > Rails, because it's rapidly become very trendy, which means that > demand for programmers will have outstripped experience with it) Very true. Nevertheless most people/companies will want to have functionality that works, and they want it now. If someone steps up and says "I'll do it, in time, at a competetive pricing" noone will question the language and tools used to write it. Proof? VB, PHP, Ruby, and so on. Other people/companies have followed the strategy of going with future-proof new developments. So they migrated from Assembler to COBOL, from COBOL to C, 4Gen, Java, you mention it. Did they get better software? I have my doubts. Perl is not the best language for everything. Maybe not even the best language for anything. It's just fun to write... -- Johan
