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All the Perl that's Practical to Extract and Report

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Talking with Alan Burlison about Perl v PHP, Solaris v Linux 3 Comments More | Login | Reply /

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  • They are part of a (now) well-known business pattern. Read The Innovator's Dilemma or its follow-up The Innovator's Solution.

    I'd never thought of applying the theory to programming languages. But it fits. Some of the pressures documented in The Innovator's Solution to pay close attention to existing customers apply in the case of Perl as well if you interpret them just right. The pricing part is not quite as good a fit, but it is close.

    However I've long said, if you want to improve the visibility of

    • Umm, so why is Java so popular ? I've never seen an ISP that supported it.

      If Perl is going to compete with PHP, then its time for me to switch to Ruby.

      See also Idiocracy [imdb.com].

      • Umm, so why is Java so popular ?


        Java takes a totally different approach facilitated by a huge marketing machine funded by number of large businesses who have bet the farm on Java.

        1) It's taught in schools.

        Java, sadly, is the predominant language taught in CS classes. Every year you have an army of CS students graduating and entering the workplace ready to code some Java on the cheap.

        2) Your CEO knows about Java.

        Java advertises in business magazines. Business folks have "Java" branded into their brains right next to "Microsoft" as being good and reliable. There's racks and racks of books and magazines about Java. So when it comes time to choose a language, what are they going to choose? .Net or Java.

        2a) It's buzzword compliant.

        Java has a big company behind it. You can get big, comfortable, executive security blanket-style support contracts. It runs on big, expensive hardware. You can hire programmers with all sorts of important looking certifications secure in the knowledge that they're going to be good at their job (it's not about reality, folks).

        3) It's the cross-platform GUI language.

        Want to write a GUI application that works on Mac and Windows without tearing your hair out over compatibility issues? Java.

        There's more, but you get the idea. Perl and PHP go in through the back door. Java is welcomed in the front door on a path of rose petals.
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