NOTE: use Perl; is on undef hiatus. You can read content, but you can't post it. More info will be forthcoming forthcomingly.
All the Perl that's Practical to Extract and Report
every Perl script that says:
"Don't be stupid."
--Larry Wall
Stories, comments, journals, and other submissions on use Perl; are Copyright 1998-2006, their respective owners.
People believe the first thing they learn (Score:1)
That Java developer was a biologist by training & experience, who had just started out on programming a year or two ago. She felt pretty strongly that for web programming, Java was unquestionably superior to Perl because, like your quote says, Java can do servlets while CGI scripts can't & are thus Perl is slower. It was pretty obvious that she was parroting something she read in a book like this one, and that she never heard of FastCGI or mod_perl or anything like that. And in the month I spent there, we never did manage to get Tomcat running on the big Sun Enterprise server, so she had to keep developing everything on her desktop while the CGI stuff I wrote worked locally and on the server, and should have run just fine under Apache::Registry if they ever installed mod_perl. What was that about scalability? :)
I think most people -- myself included -- are inclined to just go along with the first thing they learn, no matter how bone-headed it may seem to someone more knowledgeable in the field, and we aren't willing to put the time into going into more depth & straighten out these misconceptions. I can't see an easy way to change this. You can advocate for better Perl books, but that does little to someone hearing lies in a Java or Python text (or, to be fair, the unfair digs at Java in a Perl or Python book, or whatever). I can't see a clear way out of this situation in general...
--
DO NOT LEAVE IT IS NOT REAL.
Reply to This