Re: [MacPerl] MPPE Mailing list

[Richard Gordon <maccgi@bellsouth.net>]

At 08:41 -0400 7/14/1999, Paul J. Schinder wrote:
>Personally I doubt that *any* piece of software written by MS could 
>dominate on its merits.  (Or did they buy it?)

I can't think of anything that MS actually wrote from the ground up 
except maybe Access. FoxBASE was bought and converted to FoxPro when 
Windoze became stable enough to bother with. They killed the server 
version in favor of "their" (Sybase) SQL server. The Fox indexing 
technology is why it's faster than any other disk-based RDBMS.

>But if people are using PHP, so what?  They should use the language 
>most appropriate for the job, of course.  Why do people think that 
>*everyone* is after "global domination", or that the "Big Dogs of 
>the Perl Community" want to give you one and only one choice for 
>doing CGI or anything else, or that they're completely focused on 
>"market share"?

I wasn't talking about market share in a business sense, I was just 
saying that it's better for a language to be widely used than barely 
used. If nothing else, pervasive use gets publishers interested in 
offering books on the subject and that tends to make it easier to use 
the language, whether it's Perl or anything else. Personally, I think 
that the best single reason to use Perl is that it is in wide use at 
the moment and amply supported because of that use. Employers like it 
because it makes programmers expendable, whereas they are leery about 
using less popular tools even if it would otherwise make more sense 
to do so.

> As a yapping little puppy of the Perl community, I'd certainly be 
>happier if the endless, repeated, and yes, stupid, questions that 
>could have been answered by five minutes of actual effort by the 
>questioner (usually less time than it takes them to compose a 
>message) went to PHP forums rather than the Perl forums that I read.

Entirely different issue and one that afflicts every technical list 
or forum of any kind.


Richard Gordon
--------------------
Gordon Consulting & Design
Database Design/Scripting Languages
mailto:richard@richardgordon.net
http://www.richardgordon.net
770.971.6887 (voice)
770.216.1829 (fax)

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