Within the company I work, a particular department's primary IT guy is a ColdFusion addict. Despite having nearly all of merlyn's Perl books behind him on a shelf and claiming to have a working knowledge of the language, he really doesn't know much of anything significant about Perl and has even less experience coding it. Whenever the question of web technologies comes up with regard to a new project, not surprisingly, he always claims that ColdFusion will be the best tool for the job.

To be totally honest, I don't have any real exposure to ColdFusion. I've read the FAQs and some user opinions, but that's about it. The negative I've heard doesn't come close to balancing the positive, so I haven't bothered to actually learn CFML yet. Besides, Perl does everything I could ever want to do and much, much more. Granted, sometimes it's not as easy as "drop single HTML-like tag in this document and magic works mysteriously behind the scenes" like ColdFusion is reported to be. Granted, the learning curve is a little higher and longer. Yet, there's something comforting about dealing with Perl.

Whenever I begin playing with Perl to solve a larger, more detailed project with multiple parts, I have a calm reassurance that there is a solution. In another words, no matter how insanely complex a project might be, I know Perl's up to the challenge. The only question is whether or not I am. I'm limited only by deficiencies in my imagination, my abilities, and my access to getting help from more experienced Monks on this site. I never have to worry, "Can Perl do that?"

While I've spent considerable time trying to convince the very non-technical technical decision makers that Perl is a better option, I've never really gotten into a deep debate with this one CF developer. However, I do get sick enjoyment out of hearing him constantly tell his boss, "ColdFusion can't really do that." Or, "That's a limitation with the CF server." Or, "It keeps crashing. Stupid CF server." Or, "It's not very intuitive. You tell it this, and it does something totally different." Or, "Maybe we should just write something to automatically reboot the CF server once an hour or so to make sure we limit downtime."

At one point, when he was especially frustrated by CF not being able to display one of a series of graphics dynamically, he exclaimed, "It almost seems like it'd be easier to write this in machine language." I commented, "You know, you could just do that in Perl." He replied, "Yeah, you could. But that's basically machine language anyway."

gryphon
code('Perl') || die;

In reply to Perl = Machine Language? by gryphon

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