This is the story of my professional life:

I always offer the solution to my clients in Perl first. Many times they say Java and I respectfully walk away...

They are usually bewildered by this and ask me to sit down. I explain to them that I am unwilling to work with Java and prefer Perl, two hands down. It caches their curiosity, and many times they believe me but still insist that I can't do it in Perl (arguing about the lack of Perl programmers). If they comprimise for PHP or Ruby, Lisp or C, I take the job.

As a side note, PHP is actually a good thing for Perl. It is very popular and it gives you the opportunity to sell Perl as the real thing ;-) . It is much easier to evangelize a PHP crowd than a Java one.

During the project, the use Perl becomes inevitable, of course ;-] So I start by making Perl scrips that make the project more and more dependent on Perl (meaning I get at least CPAN installed on the company servers, this is a major victory!). ETL is usually a good place to start, I mean, every project requires some sort of data transformation and loading.

Load testing is usually another place where I plant the Perl seed. Stuff like www mechanize and alike usually do the trick. Little by little I evangelize the client on Perl, whilst the Java freaks start pulling all the papers and studies on how Perl is dead and Pathfinder uses Java and all that crap. I don't usually fight them directly, but with impresive results, which the Java teams rarely accomplish. Meanwhile, Perl silently spreads like weed...

In the end I end up using at least 30% Perl in every project, hoping that next time I'm called to the negotiation table I will have a chance to do a pure Perl project. Has happened only once in the past 2 years, but I am sure that my strategy will have its fruit eventually.

Oh, and BTW, I don't do Windows projects either.

In reply to Re: So Whatcha use perl for anyway? by ait
in thread So Whatcha use perl for anyway? by KurtSchwind

Title:
Use:  <p> text here (a paragraph) </p>
and:  <code> code here </code>
to format your post, it's "PerlMonks-approved HTML":


  • Posts are HTML formatted. Put <p> </p> tags around your paragraphs. Put <code> </code> tags around your code and data!
  • Titles consisting of a single word are discouraged, and in most cases are disallowed outright.
  • Read Where should I post X? if you're not absolutely sure you're posting in the right place.
  • Please read these before you post! —
  • Posts may use any of the Perl Monks Approved HTML tags:
    a, abbr, b, big, blockquote, br, caption, center, col, colgroup, dd, del, details, div, dl, dt, em, font, h1, h2, h3, h4, h5, h6, hr, i, ins, li, ol, p, pre, readmore, small, span, spoiler, strike, strong, sub, summary, sup, table, tbody, td, tfoot, th, thead, tr, tt, u, ul, wbr
  • You may need to use entities for some characters, as follows. (Exception: Within code tags, you can put the characters literally.)
            For:     Use:
    & &amp;
    < &lt;
    > &gt;
    [ &#91;
    ] &#93;
  • Link using PerlMonks shortcuts! What shortcuts can I use for linking?
  • See Writeup Formatting Tips and other pages linked from there for more info.