Damian Conway on Perl and its future

“Greg: Many people are faced with managers who see Perl as a
dying language – apart from “get a new job,” what advice would you
give to them to evangelise Perl?

“Well, first of all, see above.

“Also, they need to look at the issue from their manager’s
perspective. Many Perl developers see their goal as being to
develop in Perl; their managers see their goal as being to develop
cheaply, effectively, reliably, robustly, maintainably, quickly,
and with as little risk as possible. In whatever language achieves
all that.

“So Perl advocates need to focus their arguments for using Perl
on those needs, rather than on their own desire to use Perl. In
other words, they need to make a business case for Perl, rather
than just a technical case.

“Such a business case might include the high number of extremely
good programmers available for Perl development, the familiarity
and skills of their existing team with Perl, the huge resource of
free software that is CPAN, the large number of mature, powerful
and scalable frameworks now available for Perl…”

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