On Thu, 24 Jan 2002, Simon Wilcox wrote: > On Wed, 23 Jan 2002, Chris Carline wrote: > > In anything less than the largest software houses, a standard language > will be chosen and used because it will reduce the maintenance costs.
I'm not sure if this is universally true or not. In the job I'm freelancing at now, they're willing to use whatever language does the task best -- which so far means a heterogeneous mix of Java, Python, Tcsh, and DOS scripts, and they're not ruling out others. The idea is to find and use the right tool for each job. At the job I was at previously, half the people were doing Perl, half were doing Java, and if it counts they had a guy using Matlab for whatever kinds of work it can provide (some sort of statistical analysis, I think). At the company before that I was doing all my work in Perl, but they had developers using Java, C++, and a graphical scripting language which I never got to take a look at. Of these companies, only one of them was bigger than 50 employees or so, and at the bigger one I was working within a semi-autonomous department of less than ten people (the IT department was all standardized, but we didn't deal with them at all really). This is all anecdotal of course, but the point is that I don't think you can say that the tendency to standardize on a language correlates to the size of the organization. Moreover, if a good framework exists for working on a variety of languages -- such as Parrot and CLR could both provide -- then I think this "right tool for the job" mentality will flourish in all sized organizations, big and small alike. > Java is winning because management believe it is cheaper. Of course they > are wrong but how do you convince them of it? Where are the case studies? http://perl.oreilly.com/news/success_stories.html ? > Unless perl is accepted as a language of choice by *management* it will > not be pre-eminent in this space. It will always find a place in the > JFDI toolbag but it will not be the number one choice at a senior level. I first came across the above URL in the form of a pamphlet in a technical bookstore. It would probably be a pretty good resource to have on hand to present to these 'educated stupid' management types as needed. -- Chris Devers "People with machines that think, will in times of crisis, make up stuff and attribute it to me" - "Nikla-nostra-debo"
