Article:		Is Perl Still Relevant?
Subject:		Some objective, empirical evidence
Date:		2005-07-18 11:51:20
From:		AdrienLamothe
Response to: Some objective, empirical evidence
Well, a huge majority of people eat fast food, which doesn't make such food particularly nutritious. My experience is that most companies don't avail themselves of the best solutions, and that there is a time lag before a good tool achieves widespread use. I believe that most people purchase programming books for their jobs or to augment their skills to acquire a job. I like both Perl and Python, but when faced with the choice of choosing which to use for a critical piece of an e-commerce site I had to go with Python because of the strong exception handling (breadth and syntactic ease.) Losing data was unacceptable, and too many things can go wrong over a network, which made comprehensive error-trapping necessary. We need more decision-makers to read sites like this, so they understand the choices available and can make better informed decisions, rather than play it safe and follow the herd.

Showing messages 1 through 2 of 2.

• Some objective, empirical evidence
  2005-07-23 18:12:55  bioinfotools [Reply | View]
  
  
  I agree with your point! (Well put, too.) As I was saying earlier, rather less clearly, book sales, demand by employers and use by choice will all differ. perhaps what we need is for employers to have more faith in the "experts" they hire to choose these things!
  
  One other thing while I remember: any relationship between fluctuations in Java text sales and the start of university semesters?
• Some objective, empirical evidence
  2005-07-26 23:40:09  AdrienLamothe [Reply | View]
  
  
  So, to differ from the argumentum ad populum, a language is relevant if it effectively provides results. COBOL is still effectively producing results, so it is certainly relevant to those using it. An otherwise effective language can lose relevance if not maintained to the point where it won't run on the operating systems people use. People are more likely to change operating systems than re-write a successful custom application program. Open source languages minimize this risk by allowing virtually anyone to alter and re-compile them; adherance to programming standards reduce the chances that the source code will require alteration.