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All the Perl that's Practical to Extract and Report

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Letting the train go by 6 Comments More | Login | Reply /

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  • are the latest versions of the Oracle Developer and Designer tools that work with Oracle 8i and 9i...
    • Ah, mea culpa. I didn't realize that the Developer & Designer tools didn't bump up in versions like the rest of the Oracle DB.

      My comments re: Java etc still hold, though...

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      xoa

      • My comments re: Java etc still hold, though...

        Not necessarily. There are plenty of shops that are using legacy software products. Sometimes the reasons are technologically and fiscally sound. Other times the reasons are simply artifacts of history. (I worked at a PRIME shop once where the main languages in use were FORTRAN IV and Fortran 77. Why? Because the system where the company initially leased computer time many years before used PRIME computers, and FORTRAN IV was the only language availab

        • D'OH! Damn submit button..

          In many cases, scrapping a system in favor of a new or updated package is foolish -- especially if the existing system works well, but the alternatives are unknown, untried and untested (by an organization). I'm sure there's plenty of demand for Oracle-only skills, especially if a company is offering its services to organizations that use Oracle widely and deeply. Marching to the beat of "new technology" benefits the vendor, not the customer.

          Of the acronyms this baffled read

          • All of a sudden, the guy's got a very good point.

            The point that I got from the letter, especially his oh-so-cute "SOAP (Dial?)", was that he had no idea what any of these technologies were, and was proud of it.

            Far be it from me to say that there's necessarily any value to SOAP/JDBC/whatever to this guy, but he should at least have some passing familiarity with the concepts of many of them. Otherwise, he's going to wind up like the COBOL-only programmer who finally decides to learn C and fails miserably when it came to producing results.

            I envision the letter writer sitting there flipping thru the magazine saying "Huh, JDBC, I don't know what that is" and skipping the article. If you see JDBC enough times, you should think "Hmm, maybe I should get a clue about it". Then he can actually make an informed decision about how JDBC applies to him, rather than hand-waving it away as "alphabet soup", yet another cutesy way of saying "I don't want to spend any brain cycles on this."

            Being aware of technology and adopting it are two different things. It's of no benefit to pretend like the rest of the world doesn't exist.

            One of the things that I enjoy most about The Perl Review [theperlreview.com] is brian's [perl.org] insistence on covering other languages as they relate to Perl. Take Ed's [perl.org] PHP article in the latest issue. He doesn't say "You should use PHP instead of Perl!" He just explains some differences. The reader is left with some information about a different language, which he may find interesting. Personally, part of me likes the way that arrays in PHP are keyed like hashes and ordered like lists.

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            xoa

            • That's what you like, what you think is best. I see no reason, though, to think he might have perfectly valid reasons for disagreeing with you (assuming he does, which to me isn't clear). Frankly, I think the neverending technology hunt is a waste of time. I only barely know what some of those technologies are, and I don't want to know. My life is busy, my brane is getting full, and I figure if I need to know about those technologies I eventually will. To each is own ...
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