[cumbria_lug] Bespoke software job

[angie ahl]

Hold up guys. You're both right.

I had the painful decision to make 3 years ago when I was working with 
a little known language called Lasso.
I didn't really know much about it when I started out and took 
recommendations which led me to Lasso. It's not a bad language but it's 
community is less than 2000 and it was starting to fall apart 4 years 
ago.

As this is my profession which I do get paid quite a bit for (when I do 
actually charge what I should, I'm not claiming to be a brilliant 
business person). I decided to take a few months to really research 
which language to go with.

Here's the decision making process and what I ended up with:

I'm a web developer so working *well* with Apache was critical. I never 
again wanted to be beholden to a company that might suddenly hike the 
price or change direction so Open Source was a must.

Microsoft was out the window as I hate them and see bit about being 
dependent on a company.

So I ended up looking at Perl, Java, Python and PHP. There are others 
obviously but these were the more established languages and the most 
capable at that time for my needs.

PHP went straight out the window as a lot of my developer friends were 
having a hell of a time with the amount of changes PHP was making at 
the time, and then started the security problems with things like 
PHPBB.

Python is great and I still intend to learn it one day, but it was 
still quite new (still is in my book).

Java is also really powerful and I intend to learn that too but the 
clincher for me was what Perl could offer.

Perl has an exhaustive library (sometimes exhausting to choose the 
right module actually) in CPAN <http://www.cpan.org>. It's very old and 
I've not had any problems with bugs. With such a huge community of 
users they get ironed out quickly. Then I found Mod_Perl which is a 
perl interpreter held in RAM with low level hooks into Apache. It was 
just perfect.

3 years down the line I know I made the right choice as I know loads of 
other Lassoers who also went to the other languages I listed. I seem to 
be having an easier time of it.

Python is used by Google BTW. There's no way it's going away. It's here 
to stay and that is a good thing.

My not so humble opinion. Sorry but it does p**s me off a bit when 
people treat this stuff so lightly. I've seen people get really burned 
by not choosing the right tool, and I'm talking heart attacks, 
literally. It's important to be comfortable with your languages and to 
think about the maintenance nightmare that lies ahead.

Mind you I did switch from Linux to FreeBSD for the same reason... 
Ducking now ;)

A

On 27 Aug 2005, at 11:43, Dave Murphy wrote:

> On 27/08/05, Ian Linwood <ian_linwood_clug at dinwoodie.freeuk.com> wrote:
>> No sticking to established tools wich will be available for a long 
>> time
>> to come. The others you mention are little known outsude the geek 
>> world
>> and will eventually fade away.
>
> Luddite! :P None of the languages I mentioned are going anywhere
> (although general usage of Ruby is certainly less than it popularity
> through Ruby on Rails). Certainly Mono is currently more of a niche
> language at the moment, but provided one of the mainstream interpreted
> languages (e.g. C#) then finding somone to maintain it should not be a
> problem. How you can claim Python is not an "established tool" when it
> is in widespread use - e.g. both Red Hat and Ubuntu use it for large
> chunks of their distribution specific code - is beyond me.
>
> Cheers,
> -- 
> Dave Murphy (Schwuk)
> http://www.schwuk.com
>
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