use Perl

I spent last week in Philly, to train on the new software (see previous entry), and I guess the development environment is tolerable enough, though the debugger kind of sucks (supposedly there are more features in the next version of the IDE). Yes, I know some people's opinions on debuggers are less than kind, but I find them necessary on unfamiliar spaghetti code :-)

The boss came wandering by when one of the app's screens was up, and he was wondering what the future of the company's development should be in, whether stay the same, or get the next version, or ...? He wasn't looking for a quick answer from me, just something to keep in mind, but he did say "and no Perl!...(after all)...you can't do that in perl"(pointing to screen). He did not know that there is a plethora of perl GUI options, and I informed him of a few. The only problem is that all I really know is a bit of Tk and Wx, and I'm completely unfamiliar with all of the IDEs for perl (though I know OF some of them, ActiveState's in particular), so I wouldn't know what to recommend at the moment, if anything. It would be interesting to build an IDE around WxPerl, though I doubt I have the time (and/or the expertise) for that.

One of the nice parts of the trip was that phl.pm was having a social meeting that week, so I went and enjoyed some delicious Polish food and good company. Conversation was mostly about perl, but I'm not complaining about that (heck, regarding the last paragraph, someone suggested Komodo, which I'll have to look into); my only complaint was not winning the book that Dominus gave away :)