Nice piece. Well written.

Here are a few thoughts it provoked.

• When I think of "Enterprise Software", I think of software where the enterprise's role is to buy it, configure it, and interface to it. Your piece talks more in terms of the enterprise building software. You may want to distinguish the two up front. There are probably others in situations like mine, where I and my team mostly "build" software, but the enterprise mostly "buys" software.

• You identify Java as a language that can

  provide some measure of protection against mediocre developers.

  This naturally provokes the thought that that seems a valuable thing to do, and it sounds like Perl doesn't do it. "Gee," one thinks, "why would I want to bring in Perl and give free rein to mediocre programming." I think what you are talking about here is aspects of a language which constrain innovation more, or constrain it less.

  I find it implicit in where you go with the piece after that that in some places it's important to constrain the damaging side of innovation, and in others it's important to encourage the positive things innovation has to offer. To give examples outside of software, no one wants a thoroughly innovative surgeon, or an unimaginative sales force.

  I think it's worth thinking about whether or how to make this dilemma more explicit in the piece.

• You might make the case for one-off pieces of code with an argument along the lines of the following:
  • Any command line with one or more pipes is a program.
  • It's usually so brief or reproducible that it's not worth retaining a copy, let alone documenting.
  • There is a place for a pipe on the command line. We would be mightily constrained without it.
  • There is also a place for something a little less evanescent than a command line. But not suffering the release overhead appropriate for a complex program. A one-off is a light-weight program, but not as light as a command line.

• While I enjoyed the piece, I enjoyed the discussions responding to it at least as much, especially some of your detailed responses to tem. They fleshed out some fairly generalized thoughts of the piece. I'm not at all convinced there is any way to bring some of that flavor back into the main piece, but I thought I'd mention it.