oh sorry....

Ya know, these are the same people that decide that using the canned security in .NET and windoze is perfectly acceptable. But I guess some people have to learn the hard way. By the way, don't get the idea I've let this keep me from learning a little of it myself.

As for Perl in the "enterprise" (I never saw that part of Star Trek), I still agree with chromatics question. As for the definition, why isn't it simple? His was.

As for reading other peoples code and working in large groups, I would be willing to make a cheap bet. There is no project so big that you need so many programmers. I honestly believe many projects are over-engineered and the programmers under skilled.

I have never had the opportunity to work in large groups. However, that has never kept me working on large projects. Here are the reasons that I think (I could be wrong ;) there are very few differences between languages when it comes to big problems.

1. A programming language will not make coders write good code, no matter how strict the language is.
2. A programming language will not make coders write documentation, no matter how easy it is. And for those of you with experience you know how easy it is in Perl.
3. A programming language will not make coders communicate with each other any better.

If you think about it, a language can only make these things worse by resisting the need of being intuitive. Skill, simplicity, documentation, and communication are all failing points of not only programming projects, but also businesses.

smiles

One thing missing in this discussion is that if I write a commercial application in Perl, how do I sell it without exposing the code?

I was asked about it in my company when I wanted to write a tool. Even though we gave the tool to our customer, we did not sell it.

May be there is a way and I do not know it. I thought compiling it to native code is not supported yet.

Here is a cool idea:

Why not write Sun's pet store project in Perl and bench mark it?

I know this is an entirely different discussion, but...
why would you need to hide the code?

If I want to look at the guts of a java program (which isn't native to anything but a JVM) I can just decompile it.

Just an opinion but, to me IP law is what protects code ownership, not hokey compilation schemes. If someone wants to steal your program, they're gonna steal your program.

If the program is legitimately yours, then good customers will pay for it. I've seen some ginormous products, written in Perl, come in the door where I work, and it never kept the company from shelling out 6 or 7 digits for it. Granted, all of these products came with service contracts. But then again, I have this feeling high-end java based products come with service contracts as well.

smiles