I feel your pain

I wish that my openning line was funnier than it is but I find myself in a very similar position. I have been trying for several months to write a whitepaper for bringing perl into a large, closed, cathedralesque financial organization.

Every methodology I try to establish just seems to take the fun out of perl by taking the creativity and freedom out of the code itself. CPAN, version control, support, style conventions, security, All seem like round holes and all I have are square pegs to deal with.

At the Perl 4.0 Conference I made a great effort to find out the size and scope of the businesses that 'deploy' perl. The term 'deploy' confused 99.9% of everyone I asked and seemed to catch even merlyn by surprise.

My conclusion is that Enterprise perl does not exist and like my perl predecessors it's up to me, and other's like me to make it exist. It may not be as romantic as cleaning up garbage collection in perl 6, but I believe that it is even more important to the immediate growth of perl as an industry accepted language.

Most perl people have no clue that roadblocks exits. The dumbfounded and shaking heads I ran into in Monterey could have shifted tetonic plates when I explained that Perl was not an approved development language in our organization.

As for solutions the three primary things I see that need to be created are:

  1. An internal CPAN module that logs and tracks module installation for version control.
  2. Separating the system perl (especially in the case of Solaris) from the individual developers perl enviornments.
  3. Creation of an internal perl support site where the same type of interaction that occurred in your small team can be shared and participated in by the entire organization.
  4. Strict enforcement of some style conventions such as:
    1. perl -Tw (at least through the system test/readiness phases
    2. Embedded POD documentation
    3. Utilization of perl's internal VERSION control

I'm onto about my 30th crack at this whitepaper so if you come up with anything please share!

coreolyn Duct tape devotee.

In reply to RE: why i may have to leave perl... by coreolyn
in thread why i may have to leave perl... by eduardo

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