in reply to Why Perl is a Valid Choice

Open Source: * You can look in and fix perl modules. * You can look in and fix perl itself.

That, I think, is actually a bad argument. What corporate manager wants to spend man-hours and money on fixing the programmin language he chooses? Yes, it's nice that we can if we need to, but using that as a selling point rather implies that we're going to need to...

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Re^2: Why Perl is a Valid Choice
by tirwhan (Abbot) on Feb 03, 2006 at 14:43 UTC

    Every IT manager worth his salt will know that there comes a time when you need to find out more about your underlying libraries/systems than the API documentation tells you. With closed-source systems this often means scouring the web for anecdotal evidence or begging the vendor for more detailed information. Having the source available is the ultimate documentation and can save you lots of hours of guessing and testing. To then have the possibility to change the underlying system to better suit your needs, legally distribute your changes and even maybe merge your changes back into the mainline distribution, can be invaluable. So yes, I think it's a strong selling point. For clueful people, that is.


    All dogma is stupid.
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Re^2: Why Perl is a Valid Choice
by cbrandtbuffalo (Deacon) on Feb 03, 2006 at 20:17 UTC
    Good point. 'Fix' implies broken. I changed it to 'modify' since that implies choice of different behavior, and that's what I really meant. The funny thing is, in my head, I was contrasting Perl to some purchased apps we have that have problems right now. And, of course, we can't see what's wrong and we're waiting for support to figure it out. :) Thanks.
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