On Sat, Feb 02, 2002 at 11:26:35AM -0500, Dan Sugalski wrote: > Ah, being indoctrinated in the Ways of Python, huh? :)
Wait, I thought that Parrot would take care of that Python problem. About five months ago, Boston.com started a process to decide on a content management system to use. Some of the vendors were the big web content management systems. Some were small companies who really thought "stick it all in a Mysql database and serve every page dynamically" was an answer that could scale to a site of our size. Some were from companies whose total dominance of the desktop PC market allow them to buy 3nd rate CMS vendors and through marketing and lowball pricing create significant market share. Some of the choices were big black box solutions had great tools for the content developers, but would have destroyed the capability for the software development staff to create web applications alongside the content. (I recently heard this described as the "site on a stick" approach.) Some were somewhat extensible, but designed for a slightly different style of content than boston.com has. Some seemed like great deals to the finance department. Zope wound up being something content department found appropriate for their needs, and the software development found to be a good toolkit to work with. Semantically, Python and Perl seem very similar, even though their syntax is wildly different. If I have to compromise, I'd rather give up on the syntax and keep the semantics than some other choices (like Java, or VB) in which I'd have to give up both. I haven't taken a close look at pyperl/zoperl, but we might be able to use those packages to use perl too. (The stuff that Zope writes for us, I'm assuming will all by Python. They seem to be pretty happy with the language.) No matter what, Perl will still have its place at Boston.com, I'd hate to do the data file munging scripts in python. Perl may loose its place in our origanization as a web development language, but it will always be useful as a practical extraction and report language (and as a pathetically eclectic rubbish lister.) -- "How will I remember this day?" -- Samantha Lanmgead, age 4 1/2.
