Re: bad nasty evil thread
In message <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>, Roger Burton West <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> writes: > Because purchasing decisions are made by people who don't have to work > with the systems; Not always the case, though. At easynet, the final monetary say might be in the hands of the higher Gods, but purchasing decisions are made very much on the "shop floor". If you can justify it business-wise, you can have it. > Because those people still think that, by dealing with a single > established company, they have some recourse if things go wrong; It depends which company you're talking about, I suppose, but that's one of the reasons people buy the Suns and Compaqs of the world, to have that kind of "It's 3am, it's all gone to arse, panic" backup. > Because those people persist in judging the value of a thing by its > cost. In these times, unfortunately, that can be the life or death of a company. -- rob partington % [EMAIL PROTECTED] % http://lynx.browser.org/
Re: bad nasty evil thread
In message , Chris Devers <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> writes: > On Wed, 23 Jan 2002, Struan Donald wrote: > > > Regardless of what you might think of Java, C#, Ruby et al they are > > fairly new and hence in some people's eyes[1] better not to mention more > > buzzword friendly. > > Aren't Perl & Java pretty much the same age? Isn't C# just Java in > different clothing? And Ruby, well, there's a bit of hype in the Perl > community (usually coming across as similar to parental pride at an > offspring that is growing up into a fine, upstanding adult), but is > anyone actually using Ruby for anything serious at this point? Define "serious". Ruby currently stands, in an intermediary role, between the fine people that use UKOnline and "bad things" on the internet. It's also being infiltrated into other areas of the easynet[1] systems (but don't tell them, they fear change.) Seriously, though, the Ruby script replaced some C code and is a lot easier to maintain (even with my shonky coding), it's a lot more flexible, and the performance doesn't suck that much in comparison. The main problem I have with Ruby for easynet[1] is that most of the things I do need web frontends and I really need Template Toolkit for that. Hopefully someone[2] will take pity on me and port it to Ruby RSN. Then I'll start replacing the evil PHP and Perl we have lying around with Ruby. *cackle* [1] branding guidelines, "bold and with a lower-case 'e'" [2] I started, got bored, gave up. -- rob partington % [EMAIL PROTECTED] % http://lynx.browser.org/
RE: bad nasty evil thread
On Wed, 23 Jan 2002, Scottow Adrian - adscot wrote: > What is rather more likely to happen is people start to use Perl 6 and find > out how cool it is and use this for new development instead of Perl 5. > Leading to a two perl platform situation. Hmmm I wonder how many people out > there still have to write and support Perl 4 stuff. I'd tend to agree with that side of things, and a lot of the perl in use doesn't do anythinng complicated that will get really messed up by perl 6. The way I see it is that 6 will start shipping with redhat, and the simple stuff will need minimal effort to convert, and soon enough /usr/bin/perl will point to perl6, and perl5 will have to be called as perl5. And I pick redhat merely because it's a hugely popular distrib, and they do tend to want to get the new/cool/geeky options in there quickly, so the other distribs will copy, the home users will install and that will also drive the ISP market to support it for their clients (though I do admit virtually zero knowledge of perls use in non-netcentric environments, I have a real difficulty understanding the mindset required for producing huge tracts of code that will run for 40 years, won't get any new hardware, and is designed to be expanded internally, rather than through interfacing to other processes[1]) Of course, any complex code currently in development or enhancement will have an amount of pressure to move it to perl 6 to take advantage of the 'real programming' features that it does better, and to help a little with futureproofing. That said, I was talking to someone the other day who was working on something that only runs on perl4, but I've not had that conversation prior to that for several years. the hatter [1] Actually, this is something I've been wondering a little about london.pm-ers, there have been a fair number of posts from people asking things that I would consider beginner-level internet-related stuff while showing that they understand programming a lot better. Are there many people on here who use perl for systems that don't end up on the far end of an HTTP request, or talking to a system that ends up talking to such an app ? I'd say that the vast majority of sysadmins and internet-related developers I know all use perl, so assumed that the converse was true. Is there a secret world that I haven't seen, obscured by the fact that it doesn't come with the skills to self-promote itself as much on the net by default ?
Re: bad nasty evil thread
Roger Burton West <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> writes: > On Wed, Jan 23, 2002 at 07:02:50PM +, Andy Wardley wrote: >>Because, as Roger put it, they have highly-paid liars telling the >>decision-making credulous fools how wonderful it is. > > And I spent Monday setting up a Linux fileswerver which is now going to > be abandoned. Why? Because the person running it decided that something > that didn't say "Microsoft" on it was too scary, and he was "safe" with > Windows. People who have real experience don't make decisions like > that; it's the idiots we have to worry about. Please, these people are *not* idiots. And if we persist in calling them that and treating them as if they *are* idiots then we are going to continue to be perceived as scary people that no sane person should go near. -- Piers "It is a truth universally acknowledged that a language in possession of a rich syntax must be in need of a rewrite." -- Jane Austen?
