At 03:03 PM 12/13/00 +0000, Greg Cope wrote:
>Chris Winters wrote:
> >
> > * Gunther Birznieks ([EMAIL PROTECTED]) [001212 23:53]:
> >
> >
> > > With that said though, I still love Perl.
> >
> > Me too :-) It's frustrating to be doing something in Java that would
> > take a much shorter time in Perl. But then there are things in Java
> > that are simpler than Perl as well.
> >
>
>Appologies if I am butting in - but what you apppear to say here is that
>you are using JAVA because its sex / marketdriods know of it, yet perl
>would be the quicker (and hence cheaper solution ?). Surley for this
>reason you should use perl and persuade the PBH of the cost benefit here
>?
>
>This has hit on a point - in that may people choose Java over Perl
>because its sexier, which becomes self forfilling, unless we (the perl
>community) persaude people that (mod_)perl is sexy....
Well, for me we do Java because I know that there are a couple drivers.
1) I do know of situations were Java is a better/easier tool.
2) For us its not about what is sexy, but what will sell. By the time we
talk to a company, the debate of Perl vs Java is over and they've already
spent the money on Java infrastructure or training their guys on Java.
There is very little commercial benefit for us to tout the benefits of Perl.
One of the things I said earlier is that I think that the time it takes a
good Java guy to develop something vs a good Perl guy seems to be about
equal in terms of our real experiences (with Java being a bit longer).
And then when it comes to maintenance (handover) the IT staff of the places
we deal with are already trained in Java.
So I guess it's a matter of degree. I simply do love Perl, but I don't hate
Java, I just merely really like it. I guess you could say I cheat on my
Perl gf all the time. :) But unlike in life, I don't think a monogamous
relationship with my language is actually very healthy.
I think Chris' views may be similar. When you become a company selling a
commercial product, it's usually SMEs who don't care. Large corporates (If
you want to sell your product for over US$100k) will usually want to see
that it fits within some infrastructural puzzle they've already been
setting up pieces for or plan to set up the pieces for.
The problem is that all the time you save developing in Perl won't matter
if your sales team is going to have a hard time selling it because their
target market will be different.
BTW, I know large corporates and investment banks do use Perl and I've used
Perl in those environments. But while they enjoyed the benefits of rapid
development in-house, when they buy a commercial product with a large price
tag, it raises the profile of the product and many more decision makers
come in. When this happens, it slows down a sale tremendously because no
one wants to choose a "bad product" that "doesn't fit in the big picture"
in front of their peers although they would trust their own in-house
programmer to quickly write something in Perl.
Corporations are always political that way -- It's not a fault of
corporations, large societies just tend to form pockets where people of
like mind flock together and so what is actually normal disagreement among
people with individual ideas tends to get amplified into the phenomena of
politics because in a large society people can't know each other well
enough and it adds a lack of trust to the mix which equals politics.
I may be overloading the meaning of the word politics in this sense. But I
don't think politics means an organization is bad, it's just how societies
work when not everyone knows each other and you have people coming and going.
So it depends on whom you want to target. If you target SME's, I guarantee
you'll scramble to get them to sign off on a 10,000 purchase cuz they watch
every dime. So you work really really hard to make a sale to an SME to show
them value. Large corporates also require this, but they require doing it
to a small committee rather than 1 decision maker. But if it takes 1 month
to make an SME sale at 10k, and 3 months to make a corporate sale at 100k.
It's still more efficient to make the corporate sale and always looks good
on your marketing literature to have a big name than a small name.
Having a big name makes it easier to sell to SMEs too ... "Well, it was
good enough for God, so as an earthly mortal, you should be able to use
this product too and we'll even give you a discount." Wink, wink.
Wow, I just realized I am getting really off topic!
Sorry,
Gunther
