Re: web programming

> One of our competitors sunk well over a million bucks into Sun/Oracle
> hardware, and thought they'd be "cutting-edge" by doing all of their
> back-end programming in Java. The end result is that our $20,000 cluster
> using Linux, Postgres, and Perl out-performs their setup by a very
> significant factor, and also has a greater potential for scalability. It's
> also a lot easier for us to find programmers than they can, and we turn out
> new products faster than they do.

I really appreciate Perl CGI because it's an amazingly fast
development environment, much faster than any Java-based system
I've seen. Just edit the script and test; there's no compiling,
no copying or restarting of servers. mod_perl isn't quite
as good, since you have to restart Apache, but Apache restarts
instantly, so that's not a really serious concern. Java's
compilation time and the regular need to restart the Java
environment really slow down development work. (I've yet
to find a servlet system whose "automatic reload" feature
truly works as advertised.)

I've also noticed that people who don't know Perl really
tend to underestimate how many really good Perl developers
there are.

- Tim