Re: Re: The Black Art of Perl Programming?

Tell me, what's so specific about e-commerce with Perl?

It's a field in which people are widely using Perl. Why not have a book on it? For just a second, let us Perl programmers think like business men.

it's problems and solutions are language independent.

Perl has many features that solve common problems in e-commerce, as do other languages. But I prefer Perl, so why not hype it?

Security isn't a topic that's e-commerce specific - and the fact that an e-commerce site needs to address security isn't something that's only important for e-commerce sites using Perl.

If I ran a major online business that uses Apache and mod_perl, I would certainly want to know what Perl can do for me security wise. I would be interested in other things as well (like the reliability and speed of Perl), but security would be a concern. Just look at all the bugs that people have recently found in PHP.

Comment on Re: Re: The Black Art of Perl Programming?

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Re: The Black Art of Perl Programming? by jonadab (Parson) on Nov 17, 2005 at 12:47 UTC
For just a second, let us Perl programmers think like business men. No thanks. I mean, you can do that if you want, but I'm not. Maybe the real issue you're running into is Perl culture. As a rule, Perl culture values two things: work, and play -- i.e., getting stuff done, and having fun. Things that are at odds with both of those two values (i.e., activities that neither get anything useful done nor are fun) are widely valued in the business community (Yay, more meetings!), but Perl culture tends to reject such thinking. A book devoted to e-commerce with Perl wouldn't sell, because Perl programmers wouldn't consider it any more useful (for getting things done, such as e-commerce work) than any other mod_perl book (no, the problem domain for ecommerce is not specially atypical), and a book on ecommerce frankly sounds like about as much fun as a root canal. Neither particularly useful nor much fun means most Perl programmers won't buy it. Perl programmers are the people who buy the most Perl books, so if they're not going to buy it, it's gonna flop, unless it's part of an extant highly-successful series (e.g., Perl for Dummies probably sells pretty well to people with no prior Perl experience because it's riding on the success of prior books starting with DOS for Dummies).	[reply]

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Re: The Black Art of Perl Programming?
by jonadab (Parson) on Nov 17, 2005 at 12:47 UTC

For just a second, let us Perl programmers think like business men.

No thanks. I mean, you can do that if you want, but I'm not.

Maybe the real issue you're running into is Perl culture. As a rule, Perl culture values two things: work, and play -- i.e., getting stuff done, and having fun. Things that are at odds with both of those two values (i.e., activities that neither get anything useful done nor are fun) are *widely* valued in the business community (Yay, more meetings!), but Perl culture tends to reject such thinking. A book devoted to e-commerce with Perl wouldn't sell, because Perl programmers wouldn't consider it any more useful (for getting things done, such as e-commerce work) than any *other* mod_perl book (no, the problem domain for ecommerce is *not* specially atypical), and a book on ecommerce frankly sounds like about as much fun as a root canal. Neither particularly useful nor much fun means most Perl programmers won't buy it.

Perl programmers are the people who buy the most Perl books, so if they're not going to buy it, it's gonna flop, unless it's part of an extant highly-successful series (e.g., Perl for Dummies probably sells pretty well to people with no prior Perl experience because it's riding on the success of prior books starting with DOS for Dummies).

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