Re: Perl Doesn't Suck

On Fri, Jun 29, 2001 at 05:20:40PM -0400, [email protected] wrote:
> There's the trick, Solaris is Sun's Blessed Platform.  As a
> Linux/PowerPC user, I know how Ziggy feels.  I'm almost totally
> ignored by Sun and I'd imagine I'd have just as much trouble getting
> it working as he did.

This is the issue in a nutshell.  Let's not mix business issues
with technical ones.  Let's not mix cluster management with simple
end-user installation.  Let's not mix businesses losing millions
by the microsecond with the guy who just wants his little website
to just *work*. [*]

Personally, I don't really care what my support options are at 4am,
who I can pay to rouse out of bed, or whose pager I can pay to
page.  I want technology that works, not technology with a glitzy
sales presentation and more hype than the Beatles.  

I don't want technology that's unnaturally bound to customer support
to make it work.  I want something that works, as advertised, and
works reliably enough for me to adopt it (perhaps after making a
few patches).

Plenty of companies find lots of work playing in Sun's (or Oracle's
or Microsoft's ....) view of the world.  That does not define the
world of computing.  Not by a longshot.  Let's not forget that the
mainframe never died, even after 20 years predicting it's imminent
demise.  Remember too that the proprietary, commercially supported
client/server programming languages focused on "mainstream platforms"
like Win3.1+Sybase are now a footnote to history.

This is especially sad with Java, which promised to be write-once
run-anywhere, and continues to fail to deliver on that promise.
This is especially nice with Perl, which has delivered on write-once
run-anywhere without promising it, and has done so for more than
a decade.  Doubly so when Perl's single-implementation standard
gives predictable results pretty much everywhere, while Java is
subject to multiple JVMs which can be differently buggy.

> But yes, module installation can be made easier.  We're working on it.

There are always improvements to be made, even with Perl.  But where
we are today, Perl doesn't suck.

Z.

*: What good is that multi-billion dollar business doing?  Who knows.
   What good is that little guy doing?  Who knows, but it might be the 
   next version of the OED, a realtime snapshot of the company's P&L,
   or satellite data that reaches you quicker.