Hard to comment on, since I don't know how your company works. But, if you avoid any Perl 5.6-isms, you should likely be OK. What does he mean by 'system to system'? UNIX to NT? RedHat Linux to IRIX? Paying attention to the perlport man page should help with any issues on that.

How is everybody handling the speed issue?

What speed issue? He touts csh, but worries about speed issues in Perl? How about speed of development? Or speed of finding reusable code? Has this man heard of optimizations?

have written programs in csh for years and have basically pushed that language to the limit + 1 and csh does not fail

As davorg pointed to, he should be refered to this. I once had a boss who wanted us to do things in Fortran, because he knew it well, and it always worked well for him. How portable is csh? How portable is Perl? We also have moved into the SQL arena and the Perl API is a little weak and slow when talking to the SQL engines that I'm using(Oracle, MYSQL Ver 3.2xx, SQLServer 7.0).

NOONE else uses Perl to talk to these engines!! Weak? I have never had a problem. Slow? Maybe queries are bad, maybe indexes are wrong, maybe this is the fault of the dba (always blame it on the dba!) Or, your own DBD can be written to make it faster.

I would like to hear if anyone has done some complicated things with Perl. A panelization script or basic process control is not a test of Perl handling.

As Randal suggested, refer to the Success Stories. Refer him to POE, or any countless complex module. Or, is he talking about the abilities of this companies employees?

Where do we find Perl programmers, csh programmers are everywhere, but Perl programmers seems to be a dyeing breed at lease in our neck of the woods

What neck? There are Perl programmers everywhere! Many of them looking to find a Perl-centric job. I would guess many Perl programmers will also have csh on their resume. Suggest relocating good candidates. Suggest searching job boards. Tell him only csh programmer spell 'dying' with an 'e'.

I would be interested to help there if anyone wants to make Perl really work better for Genesis or Enterprise.

He can send patches to p5p :)

It almost sounds like this guy likes what he knows well, and doesn't know much about Perl. Personally, I would throw some of the back at him. He doesn't say how or why he thinks the DBI interface is slow and weak, or what he is comparing the slowness and weakness to. He should read this, which tells of how NBCi uses Perl with it's databases, or here so he can learn how UniCredito Italiano uses Perl/DBI, as well as here to learn how the US Census Bureau uses Perl.

I hope some of this helps, and wasn't just a big rant :)

Cheers,
KM

This doesn't directly answer your question, but I'm surprised to see a serious product being programmed in csh. I thought that everyone would have read "Csh programming considered harmful" by now.

"Perl makes the fun jobs fun
and the boring jobs bearable" - me

My vote is for the old bait and switch tactic.
The weapon of choice?
Befunge.

After a few days of befunge the boss will be screaming for perl...
although one would of thought csh would've softenend him up a bit already. <g>

-- Randal L. Schwartz, Perl hacker

Firstly I would voice a note of caution some IT is full of zealots (there are many monks in that camp ;-) ) if this guy is a zealot then no amount of rational arguing will make a blind bit of difference. Tiss a painful fact of life, this guy does sound quite prejudiced but hay ho.

As a csh, Perl, C, C++ etc, etc, etc. programmer using any interpreted language, how do we control the versions from customer to customer or systems to system? I would like to see a discussion on that.

I would ask him to explain what issues he means he has asked a very important question but not given you enuff information to allow you to reply. Tiss my guess that he is worried that your customers will not have perl installed. Only you can deal with this question by refering to your customer base. Perl does not come as standard as many UNIX as we would like solaris did not (not sure about 8) some versions of hpux shipped with perl 4 !! some not at all. It is a fair worry, it is reasonable to expect to have to require perl to be installed for a significant number of deployments. All depends where you are deploying.

Also, has anyone really written a major program with Perl for Genesis or Enterprise?

How is everybody handling the speed issue?

What speed issue?

We have written programs in csh for years and have basically pushed that language to the limit + 1 and csh does not fail no matter how intense(There is no other language running just UNIX).

Trying to suggest that csh is a faster language is just plain dumb I would suggest that you benchmark some process. Take a csh script and re-write it in perl to show him where the speed problem is ;-)
I am not sure what the parenthesised sentence means.

We also have moved into the SQL arena and the Perl API is a little weak and slow when talking to the SQL engines that I'm using(Oracle, MYSQL Ver 3.2xx, SQLServer 7.0).

Once again ask him what he means by weak .. does he not like them or does he consider them slow or simply not there. It is hard to deal with such vague criticism.

A few more items of discussion: Where do we find Perl programmers, csh programmers are everywhere, but Perl programmers seems to be a dyeing breed at lease in our neck of the woods.

What neck of the woods are you in, it is true that good perl rogrammers are hard to find but then I would have to imagine that so are CSH programmers. Cross training is a viable alternatve if you have csh/C/C++ people. I would directly challenge this comment tho I dont believe it for a minute.

I hope this helps. To sum up he comments are all to vague to reply to get him to tie them down and I am sure you will find out how little he actually knows. Good luck in your quest </p?
--

Zigster

If client access to/modifying source is an issue, how do you handle it for existing csh scripts? If it's not an issue for csh scripts, why is it an issue for the perl equivelent?

If obfuscating source is a big deal, perl has a compiler or you could obfuscate the source.

RE: Speed
If csh scripts are fast enough for your application, I don't see perl's speed being an issue. If speed is a major issue, you can always consider coding speed critical components in C (as xs) and using perl for the rest.

RE: SQL
Perl has DBI. What is he comparing to DBI? Perl DBD drivers provide useful things like statement caching that provides a speed boost for Oracle and other databases.

RE:HTML and C
What is your ex-boss talking about? Writing CGI stuff in C? mod_perl and apache will give you a platform that can execute nearly as fast as C but with less development time/effort.

RE: Libraries/plug-ins
Has your ex-boss ever visited www.cpan.org? In addition to CGI/mod_perl libraries, you can find modules that will reduce the need to write all your own libraries.

RE: Programmer availability
It's pretty difficult to find good programmers in any language, not just perl, csh, or C.

RE: TK
Perl has an interface to TK. It's been around long enough and is popular enough that OReilly has published books on Perl+TK.

Frankly, I think your ex-boss has a bias against perl (or anything different). Much of his post is FUD against perl.

TROLL!!!! That's what your boss' post screams!

It is so blatantly biased that I don't think it is worth answering it with any Perl advocacy. Look at Dominus Why I Hate Advocacy , breathe, and above all avoid a flame war that will only damage you.

Just ignore him, that should get your boss mad and he will probably troll with some even more stupid points (why use Perl when you have Lisp? Any Emacs user knows List so there is an endless supply of Lisp programmers, as opposed to only those 2 guys at Yahoo and that guy at JPL...).

I think I have plenty of info to make an intelligent argument without getting into a flame war.

Prost,
Moe