[ILUG-Social] Perl is a pool language

[Kathryn Cassidy]

> > Perl is a poor choice of language for all but the smallest projects IMHO.
> > Good for small write-only scripts. Poor for application development. (I know
> > because I've used it for this type of stuff).

So have I.  We use it for most of our credit card validation and
pre-paid cellular software (big systems, serving several thousand
transactions a day).

I was at YAPC (Yet Another Perl Conference) Europe a couple of weeks
ago and I met a lot of other people who are using perl for critical
applications.  BBC use it for all of their digital TV content stuff.
Blackstar.co.uk use it for their shopping cart software.
www.iii.co.uk use it for their online investment stuff.  The Scottish
Registry office uses it for their systems.  I could go on.

These people praised perl for its maintainability, fast development 
time and the ease of
software reuse which it permits, particularly with reguard to CPAN
where you can get prewritten modules for just about everything you
might want to do.  Maybe they were making it up, but I suspect it's
more likely that perl can be, and is, used successfully in all types
and sizes of project.

Kathryn.