[Original thread starts here http://mail.pm.org/pipermail/kc/2006-July/000501.html] Stephen Clouse wrote:
Others will tell you that Perl is a write-only language. I.e., what one programmer writes, no one else will be able to decipher. And extended form of this is the complaint by some that Perl isn't appropriate for large projects involving many developers. This is a fall out of TIMTOWTDI.Such accusations are vile and odious lies of the bourgeoisie. Be not swayed by the Party line. I have personally managed a project involving 6 developers and 750,000 lines of Perl code. A quality OO design and instillment of best practices with Perl will get you as far as (or even farther than) any bondage-and-discipline language. Mind you, there are some things to like about B&D in C++, but RAD in Perl is fine also.
What's RAD? (Rapid Application Development?)750,000 lines? Wow. We "only" have 42,000 lines. As far as I know that makes us the biggest Perl shop in Omaha. ~3 programmers are mucking with the code at any one time. We seem to have the same level of cooperative coder angst in Perl, VB.NET, and Informix 4GL, so I haven't seen Perl as substantively different from any other language for scalability. Good documentation is always key.
I keep thinking autodiscovery in Visual Studio (and Eclipse?) should be a huge time saver, but I always seem to struggle w/ the .NET framework anyway not knowing what the methods I just autodiscovered actually do. Seems just as easy to use the Perl debugger and perldoc. I also keep thinking I need to tackle some huge stuff in Java/.NET/Python/Ruby just for personal learning, but I never seem to get around to it. Don't know that I want to set myself up to compete w/ Indian and Chinese programmer markets anyway. :) j