Today I find myself as a sofware engineer for a small company, working with about 3 or 4 other people in the engineering area. I am only one year out of college and perhaps I am naive. We built an object oriented application server that does everything that was required or requested of it before the more "seasoned" workers came on board. It is modular and extensible and very well designed.

The hot words seem to be "ubiquity", "encapsulation", and "Write once run everywhere". Java has EJB, Jini, JDK's, Embedded Java, Personal Java, VM's, J2ME, and on and on and on... I work with people who have industry experience of 20-30 years and they like the idea of buying the answers and simply "plugging them in." When one of them looked at our solution he said to his friend "I can't believe they wrote their application in a 'glue' language." I have preached the good word of perl and I might even say I've shown them that perl is a capable language for even large server side enterprise applications. And yet it is no Java...

My question, is can perl support a huge corporation? Does anyone think that perl reaches a threshold where it can no longer be looked at as meta-level of objects, services, and "beans"? Has anyone sucessfully walked accross the line of midsize (tens of thousands of lines of code) application into the domain of huge business to business corporation while keeping perl's flexibility intact? Could perl be turned into a VM kind of model? Will PalmPerl ever exist? Will perl byte code ever be viewed as an object that exports a clean well documented API for developers, or even automated systems to make calls against?

These are the questions that keep me up at night.

UPDATE: I feel motivated to add... Should perl even try? Is there a benefit? If so how?

The truth is more important than the facts.
-Frank Lloyd Wright

In reply to Can perl be anything like Java? by pos

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